Thursday, October 2, 2014

Blog roll

Nothing new to report on TenFourFox right now -- still working on the patches for 34 -- but two blog posts from the retro-Mac community I wanted to highlight:

Riccardo Mori's rebuttal on doing practical work on classic Macs. If you're reading this blog, you're probably already sympathetic to his view, and since Riccardo is very complimentary to TenFourFox and Classilla my linking to his post is totally, unapologetically and shamelessly self-serving, but I think he hits the main points very well (original article for comparison).

Martin Kukač prepares his G5 for another decade, which is his retrofit of an older G5 useful to those of you trying to maintain your air-cooled DP systems. Fortunately, my quad is already ready to go another nine innings.

4 comments:

  1. Just for info: A new Mac-on-Linux version with KVM support is available. You can boot Mac OS X Panther and Tiger with MoL on new 64-bit PowerPC computers like IBM POWER8, A-EON AmigaOnes etc.

    You can find more information in the following threads:

    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2245041

    http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=37652&forum=34&start=120&viewmode=flat&order=0#740645

    ReplyDelete
  2. Not quite sure what MoL is really about but on another topic of interest to some, I gave the daily Lubuntu build of 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) a try on my iBook G4 and the mesa/ ubuntu color distortion ABGR issue ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mesa/+bug/1275042 ) seems to be fixed, desktop and stuff looks normal and is usable now again (14.04 is still having this issue) :)

    http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/daily-live/pending/

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh meant to aks about hardware acceleration eg. on G3 and G4 Hardware in OSX 10.5 Leopard and TenFourFox.

    As far as I remember we can not use any of it because of some issue (vaguely remember an older blog entry of yours) which is why say Safari would seem albeit outdated and not save to use in general (unless updated with Tobias Leopard webkit update, if I understand this correctly-!?) seem/ feel much smoother is many ways and similarly would OmniWeb as they can use hardware acceleration, right?

    So I was just wondering if that is still the case and what could possibly be done to work around it or with it, or well what has been done? thx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. OpenGL acceleration requires support for non-power-of-two textures. That does not exist in Tiger PowerPC at all (limited to OpenGL 1.2), and only for certain card combinations in Leopard PowerPC. Since I compile against the 10.4 SDK, it won't happen, at least not in that form. TenFourFox only uses OpenGL as a window context to composite against and for no other purpose.

      As of 31 TenFourFox uses a thinner interface to CoreGraphics, so to the extent CoreGraphics is hardware-accelerated, TenFourFox will be too, but there is no explicit acceleration otherwise.

      Delete

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