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thisoldmac · 4 years

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This Old Mac Episode 4

Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to this Old Mac, this is my ongoing saga with a Mac Pro 1,1 so the Mac Pro is now fully upgraded.

As I said in the previous episode I upgraded the firmware which was a little bit fiddly but it worked in the end. The reason for upgrading the firmware was because I intended to update the processors on the Mac Pro.

Well that has been done and although I had to adapt a tool to do so in order to remove the heatsinks. The hardest part of the removal was getting the memory board piece of plastic out to get access to the heatsink screws. Everything else was straightforward.

So now the 5150 Woodcrest Dual Core Xeons have been replaced with 2 Clovertown Quad Core x5355 Xeons. And the Geekbench 3 score has increased from 4480 to 9890 so a definite improvement.

Yes the Clovertown Xeons are 2.66Ghz and yes you can install x5365 processors which are 3.0Ghz but I figured it best to swap like with like. To be honest I doubt the slightly higher clock speed would make a huge difference overall.

I have updated El Capitan from 10.11 to 10.11.6 this was so I could use Motion 5 which I will come back to later. I will give you people the caution so you don't do what I did and have to totally reinstall El Capitan.

When you first update to 10.11.6 you need to restore the Piker Alpha boot.efi and bootbase.efi files in order to stop it from booting to restore. Which is not too difficult.

However do not when the next set of updates available install the security update. I did then it locks the boot.efi and bootbase.efi behind sip and you can't restore the Piker Alpha boot so you are stuck in restore mode and have to start again with a total wipe.

Luckily I had not installed much on the El Capitan drive so wiping it and reinstalling was not much of a problem. Once back to base El Capitan I managed to upgrade to 10.11.6 restore the boot.efi files and then update everything but the security update.

So it is now working but the App Store is obviously keep telling me I have an update remaining which I will not install. Installing 10.11.6 seems also to have got rid of an annoying issue I had with 10.11 which was if I wanted to log in I had to move the keyboard from one USB port to another otherwise the keyboard didn't acknowledge. 10.11.6 seems to have sorted that problem as now it works every time I start and I have not had to move the keyboard once.

I have also managed to flash and install a Sapphire ATI Radeon 5700 HD graphics card and now it is fully installed an working with both Snow Leopard and El Capitan without any issues.

I admit none of this would have been possible without the incredible videos by dosdude1 on YouTube which step you through how to do both the processor upgrade and the graphics card flash. His videos are comprehensive and straightforward and without them I don't think I would have achieved it as easily as I did. Because as well as providing a comprehensive video he even included the links for the files required to flash the graphics card.

I had a few minor niggles while doing such but they were not due to the setup but daft things like I had to order some more thermal paste as mine went missing and when I tried to install the graphics card in the PC for flashing I realized I needed a molex to 6 pin graphics card connector as the PSU on the PC I used to flash the card didn't have the 6 pin connector. But these were minor issues.

So now I have a fully upgraded Mac Pro 1,1 which is working very well. As so now have El Capitan working I have installed various programs such as Firefox, Thunderbird, Onyx, and WriteRoom 3 so I have the basic usage covered.

I have also installed Final Cut Pro X 10.2.1, Logic Pro X, Motion 5.3.2 (which needs 10.11.4 or higher hence the 10.11.6 upgrade) and Audacity so I can now produce videos or podcasts should I feel the inclination.

Also installed Steam, Scribus and MultiMC5. Also tested if games works on Steam by installing Starbound, Terraria and Shadowrun: Dragonfall which all seem to work fine.

So that's the Mac Pro 1,1 upgraded to probably as good as it can be for now. The only future upgrades would be to install SSDs or larger drives in the future but that will be a future endeavour.

Now I need to work out what to use on this Mac Pro 1,1. I was never an owner of Macs during this Intel Mac period so I have no idea what software is good, bad or indifferent.

If anyone has any recommendations for software for me to look at I will be more than happy to see if I can find it and play with it. Be it a game, application or something totally off the wall let me know.

Well I think that's enough for this episode so until next time... Take care

#this old mac #intel xeon upgrade #os x el capitan #final cut pro X #motion 5.3.2 #graphics card update and flash #shadowrun dragonfall

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linuxlife · 4 years

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Linux Life Episode 66

Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to my ongoing quest regarding Linux. Well its definitely a strange time as I type this. The whole world is under strict quarantine and everything has gone a little bit crazy.

I know that using Manjaro on my i7 desktop is definitely driving me mental. Considering it’s Arch based everything seems to run quite slow. It’s not as if the i7-3770k is a slow processor, the machine has 32GB of DDR3 RAM and running from SSD the program still takes far too long to startup. Don’t get me wrong most things work under it but it is with no hurry.

Maybe by the next episode I might have changed what is on the i7 desktop, we will see.

I’m sure I have mentioned this before but I am mentioning it again. Occasionally I play the odd game of Minecraft, not very often but once in a blue moon I will find a modpack worth playing. Now if you want to play vanilla Minecraft then using the JAR file supplied by Mojang is more than adequate provided you have some form of Java installed.

However playing Modded Minecraft takes a bit more work. A lot of modpacks are available through the Twitch Minecraft extension. Which is as it say a plugin to run Minecraft games through the Twitch app. Now that’s fine if you are on Windows or MacOS as the Twitch app is available. However if you are on Linux its not available.

This is where MultiMC5 comes in... It allows you to download the modpacks from Curseforge and allows you to import as a zip into MultiMC5 and play them. Obviously like any Minecraft you do need a Mojang account to do so but if you see a modpack on Youtube and think that’s interesting if you can find the Curseforge zip download you can play it.

As it runs the modded Minecraft games there is nothing stopping you adding things like Optifine or shaders mods assuming your graphics card can handle them. Now some mod packs need a large amount of memory so be warned although modded minecraft can run on a something with 8GB or RAM you will probably want a small pack that doesn’t load several hundred mods (several modpacks do have Lite versions for this purpose) also as it’s minecraft you can run all of your texture packs too if you feel so inclined such as Sphax or the likes.

However take into account the larger the texture the more ram used by both the video card and ram requirement of the modpack when it comes to world generation.

So to take an example it seems the modpack of choice as I type this episode is MC Eternal been played by the likes of Direwolf20, The Yogcast and more. The pack itself is a kitchen sink modpack (but does have quests) using Minecraft version 1.12.2 and includes mods such as Vampires, Rats and many more. However the modpack does contains 315 mods so it requires quite a bit of memory to run.

MultiMC can also run the vanilla Minecraft and the Feed the Beast modpacks too. MultiMC will run the majority of modpacks that are available but like everything occasionally ones will throw it for example no matter what I tried I could not get the All the Mods 4 pack to work with it.

I’m sure someone will tell me what I’m doing wrong regards All the Mods 4 not that I am exceptionally bothered about that.

At the moment itch.io has several games listed for free due to the crazy staying at home we all have to do. One of them is Jam and the Mystery of the Mysterious Spooky Mansion.

It’s a point and click adventure game which claims to be a reserve whodunnit game. Basically you come in at the end of the (alleged) crime and have to then find evidence as to what the actual crime is. The game is pretty simple to operate and has 16 endings for you discover.

Check it out at https://ray-clark.itch.io/jam-and-the-mystery-of-the-mysteriously-spooky-mansion

However you need to be quick if you wish to play it for free as the offer runs out on Wednesday 8th April then the sale expires and it’s $2.00 to buy

I also played a fun short text adventure called Main Course which was part of the GDC relief bundle but you pay what you want and can even get it for free.

https://quantumsheep.itch.io/main-course

There are many other free games at the moment on itch.io but you can check them out yourself.

Well that’s enough to keep you amused for this episode, so until next time... take care

#linux life #itch.io #minecraft #multimc5 #free games #isolation #linux manjaro

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