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Mac Pro 1,1 worth it?

NeXT

NeXT

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 22, 2008
Messages
8,149
Location
Kamloops, BC, Canada
Six years ago I built up a fairly decent Mac Pro 1,1 and then gave it faster drives, a newer video card, 16gb ram and did the SLAED Xeon CPU upgrade to make it a dual quad. Also ran El Capitan on it because at that time it was the last version of OS X to support the 1,1 (with patches). It was fairly fast. Ran Parallels but it wasn't doing anything else I would say "professional". MAinly it was a transitional device until I could move my PC from Windows XP to Windows 7. (and now here I am looking at moving to Windows 10)

In January 2018 Apple released a security update that broke the support hack. and it's sat under my desk ever since doing nothing. That I can tell nobody ever went back and fixed it, so the general agreement in the community that still relies on the 1,1 is "reinstall and don't update lol". I can do that because I still have my patched install stick, but there's two issues:

-You have to reinstall the original CPU's because the OS X installer pukes and hangs when it sees a CPU it doesn't recognize
-The whole time I ran El Cap, the newer CPU's (you installed them AFTER you installed the OS) were never properly recognized by the OS, so Power Management never worked and the system would never sleep. Likewise with the security patch breaking El Cap it seems nobody ever fixed this either....

The system runs on a dual monitor KVM and has been otherwise taking up space next to my desk. I can think of quite a few other machines I can put there which have USB peripheral support and dual DVI outputs. Considering I have to reinstall the OS (which might just break again, if it doesn't eat away at my power bill) and it may just break its install again because it was never actually fixed is it worth it to keep a machine like that hanging around under my tight-space desk?
 
I would use an older supported OS and stick it on a shelf for when you want to mess with it.

I use a L shaped desk in my room with a 4 port KVM (single monitor) with my main machine and 3 older game rigs. In the middle I keep my DC G5 tower for when I need to do something retro related and that machine uses the analog input on my monitor with its own keyboard and mouse. The G5 doesn't get used that much but it isn't in my way either, it replaced a G4 MDD that is now on the shelf in the basement.
 
I guess I gotta be “that guy”: if you have any use for a Linux machine with its kind of specs (IE, slow CPUs, decent amount of RAM) I’d say give up on MacOS and use it for that instead. Otherwise let it go.

FWIW, I still have a 1.1 under my desk too, that I haven’t powered on for several years; I’m loathe to throw it out because it has 32GB of RAM in it. It ran Linux essentially its entire career, and they’re perfectly fine at directly booting and running 64 bit builds of it without bothering with any EFI nonsense as long as the machine has the 2007-vintage firmware update that added the crude legacy BIOS emulation layer for “Bootcamp”. (These days it’s a little bit of a hassle to do a bare metal install because most Linux distributions expect UEFI, but it’s still *possible* with futzing to do a legacy GRUB installation.)

I mean, I dunno. I guess I just don’t have the patience personally to deal with the whole unsupported OS nonsense with MacOS. I do think they unfairly screwed the first gen Mac Pros with that “32 bit EFI” excuse for not supporting them longer, with a video card upgrade they’re not much less capable than the 3.1’s and up, but… that battle is just over now.
 
HoJoPo said:
Check out this site, it seems to have the definitive guide. http://blog.greggant.com/posts/2018/05/07/definitive-mac-pro-upgrade-guide.html

Is this the bootloader you were using? https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2006-2007-mac-pro-1-1-2-1-and-os-x-el-capitan.1890435/
Click to expand...
Well after spending almost two hours reading through that the answer is: forget it.
Even to try and recover from my broken install requires a bunch of janky hacks whose documentation start off around the third floor in terms of experience that I'm not willing to go back and learn now just to get one mac to run a newer but still no longer supported OS. That goes in with "is this the bootloader you were using?" in that I don't even know that. I was given the install stick pre-patched and never looked into it until it broke. I'll just have to switch the machine out, ironically with a Windows 98 machine.
 
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NeXT said:
Even to try and recover from my broken install requires a bunch of janky hacks whose documentation start off around the third floor in terms of experience that I'm not willing to go back and learn now just to get one mac to run a newer but still no longer supported OS.
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Ain't nobody got time for that, especially when the reward is an OS that got its last security update six years ago. (Which, sure, is technically an improvement over the ten years you get with Lion, but... is it, really?)

I installed a hacked version of the Intel version of Tiger on a Dell back in 2007, played with it for a week, figured I'd been there, done that, and earned the tee shirt; just trying to read the instructions for what's necessary for later versions and trying to navigate the hardware and software requirements makes my eyes completely glaze over. Even if you're willing to put in the effort, I dunno, Hackintoshing just generally seems to me an exercise in absolute futility. OS updates are scary enough without that extra layer of "will installing this break my jailbreak?" stress piled on top.
 
One of the problems I'm also finding for these patchers is they expect you to have a relatively modern mac to run the utilities on, of which I've struggled to get my hands on anything that works. There's a late model snow white macbook and a 2011 macbook pro stuffed under the bed and both need various repairs, which adds to my steadliy decreasing reasons to give a damn about trying to get this mac pro to work again.
 
Al Kossow said:
for some subset of "OSX"
this also has nothing to do with bothering to keep an early x86 mac running
Click to expand...

Maybe the suggestion was either:

A: for those steps that require cooking an install on a newer supported Mac and moving it over you could run VMware on a non-Mac for that, or

B: You could run VMware on the Mac Pro? (FWIW, it was possible to install the bare metal VMware/Vsphere server on Mac Pros, but to do it today on a 1,1 you’d be looking for a really old version.)

Ultimately there’s no way for a 1,1 to run a version of MacOS newer than El Capitan no matter what video card upgrades or whatever you add to it because Apple started using CPU instructions that don’t exist in any CPU that fits the 1,1 or 1,2’s sockets. (The hackintosh guys have found iffy workarounds to a lot of problems with obsolete graphics hardware and whatnot to stretch the window for some later hardware, but this limit is flat out non-negotiable. Virtualization wouldn’t help either, unless it involved *emulation* of the missing instructions.) So yeah, lots of pain and agony for an OS that’s been dead for over six years no matter *how* you slice it.

Again, it will run Linux “fine”, but that comes with a big asterisk; the Xeon CPUs that work in the 1,1, even the biggest fastest non-stock quads, are really, really slow by today’s standards when you consider single-thread performance. For surfing the web or whatever the most jacked 1,1 won’t ”feel” much if any faster than a 2007-ish vintage Core2Duo Thinkpad. It might make a usable virtualization lab for playing with Openstack or something, but unless you *need* something like that…
 
Me and the Linux community have been at odds for about 15 years or so because sure it will run on everything, but they've been progressively picking things out of the universal kernels that shipped with live boot and install CD's in an effort to keep things progressing with their asinine systemD (Linus can be smart, but that will never outbalance you can also be stupid) to the point now I'm having trouble with some hardware simply coming up without video or some other hardware because oops, they removed support for it and now you need to find a kernel module, satisfy the dependencies for something they dropped in 2015, then build it into the kernel.
I can only imagine that building Linux to run on a Mac product is all levels of janky reverse-engineered device hell, mixed with something condescending about the boot process.

I'd rather run Linux on a PC, please.
 
NeXT said:
I can only imagine that building Linux to run on a Mac product is all levels of janky reverse-engineered device hell, mixed with something condescending about the boot process.
Click to expand...

Janky reverse engineering is your only option when dealing with a company that's explicitly hostile to what you're attempting to do. Kind of a fact of life, there.

Anyway. I checked, and yes, the procedure to get Linux on a Mac Pro 1.1 has gotten "complex" in part because, taking Ubuntu as an example, they've discontinued the special boot CDs they used to make *specifically* to make installing on Intel Macs made before 2008 less of a hassle. (*All* Intel Macs with the old 32 bit EFI are "broken"; not only are they incompatible with any OS that relies on 64 bit EFI services, like Apple's own operating systems post 10.7, their legacy BIOS emulation is horribly brain dead.) And if you don't want to deal with it because it's not worth the reward or it violates your principles, well, that's fine. The point I was simply making is, unlike hackintoshing, the *only* problem these machines have under Linux is the installation headaches. Take that layer out and they're just the same hardware as a 2006-ish vintage Xeon workstation PC, which, for the moment at least, is still mostly supported by mainstream Linux distributions.

NeXT said:
I'm having trouble with some hardware simply coming up without video
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Mac Pro 1,1's are one of those things that don't come up with video unless you fix something. And the thing you need to fix is a bootloader flag, not the kernel, and the reason you have to fix it is because the BIOS is a clusterfark. I guess we can crap all over the team that maintains GRUB for not automagically detecting this special case, but considering optimistically there's only ever been, I dunno, a triple digit number of people interested in running Linux bare metal on these machines I'm inclined to cut them some slack.

The moment you try to do *anything* with a Mac other than turn it on and diddle around with whatever OS Apple says is OKAY you're automatically flipping the "advanced mode" flag. If you like coloring outside the lines but hate hassle Macs probably don't belong in your life.
 
Something just doesn't compute. I'm getting as many 2009 upwards thick bodied x86 iMac all in one systems as I can because they are as cheap as chips an run modern Linux just fine...Retiring in October so these probably in use until I turn my toes up.
 
NeXT said:
Me and the Linux community have been at odds for about 15 years or so because sure it will run on everything, but they've been progressively picking things out of the universal kernels that shipped with live boot and install CD's in an effort to keep things progressing with their asinine systemD (Linus can be smart, but that will never outbalance you can also be stupid) to the point now I'm having trouble with some hardware simply coming up without video or some other hardware because oops, they removed support for it and now you need to find a kernel module, satisfy the dependencies for something they dropped in 2015, then build it into the kernel.
I can only imagine that building Linux to run on a Mac product is all levels of janky reverse-engineered device hell, mixed with something condescending about the boot process.

I'd rather run Linux on a PC, please.
Click to expand...
I am slowly moving to the *BSDs like FreeBSD (on anything made more recently) and NetBSD (for everything else) for that and other reasons.

The whole X11/Wayland idiocy, putting Rust in the kernel when (AFAIK) the compiler can't even run on 32-bit machines due to running out of address space, systemD and some other reinventing of wheels has put me off it.

When you ask Wayland fans who talk about security if they know that Solaris had Trusted X11 in 2008, or ask Rustaceans if they can talk about ADA, SPARK or MISRA C in the context of safety, and receive only blank looks in return ...
 
Caluser2000 said:
Something just doesn't compute. I'm getting as many 2009 upwards thick bodied x86 iMac all in one systems as I can because they are as cheap as chips an run modern Linux just fine...Retiring in October so these probably in use until I turn my toes up.
Click to expand...
Those series of iMacs are no longer able to sync with iTunes and the new iPhones people are buying, so as the upgrade cycle churns, those iMacs get discarded. At least, that is what I think is happening...
 
MrImprovement said:
Those series of iMacs are no longer able to sync with iTunes and the new iPhones people are buying, so as the upgrade cycle churns, those iMacs get discarded. At least, that is what I think is happening...
Click to expand...
I don't care! Neither are on in my use case and never have been. Hell I can even delete that software.
 
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