Ok, so i was looking at some random stuff on the net and came across a 2019 post about installing Catalina on unsupported macs using a patch from DosDude.
Has anyone tried this? I am wanting to try this on my MDD mac, Deep Space Nine. If anyone has any sage advice, I would love to hear it. I will likely try this on a clean hard drive so I can attempt to revert back to my current state (X.5.8).
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Hey, Doug! Been a long time!Pretty sure you're out of luck on that. Catalina's an Intel-CPU only OS. The Dosdude patcher only mentions Intel Macs in the compatibility list, and I don't think OS X has had any PowerPC code left since 10.6.
To upgrade old, unsupported *NIX style OSes, especially on unsupported hardware platforms like PPC, you are generally going to have to manually build and install packages. Most of the applications, utilities and libtaries are being maintained by someone. In the case of MacOS, it may be possible to pull in a lot of parts from Darwin or other BSD-based OSes.
It is usually not going to be possible to upgrade the kernel and some of the core Apple supplied proprietary libraries where source code is probably not available.
The upside is that it may improve compatibility somewhat with some more recent software, although the chances of very much for MacOS supporting PPC at all any more is slim. The bigger potential upside it is that it may close some security problems that might be lurking in old code.
However, there can be a downside to upgrading things, in that sometimes it can break compatibility with old applications, especially proprietary ones, because they may have dependencies on old code that would be replaced.
So anyway, that's all kind of a crap shoot. It is a good idea to proceed with caution and make frequent backups as you go along so things can be reverted if necessary.
Hey man, glad to hear from you too.
yeah, after I posted was able to see that this was not going to work on my MDD. I have it up to X.5.8 but I fear I am stuck.
The bigger picture here is that I am going to host some SATA drives on the aforementioned Sonnet Temp card. I will be running a Pi with Plex and a second Pi with OwnCloud, both using the MDD's physical drives. I want to see if there is any way I can squeeze more out of the MDD - even if i installed a non Mac OS onto it. Just wanted to pursue the Mac options to their fullest end.
...so, any sage advice?
Softwarejanitor, This is much food for though, thanks. I am still struggling to learn Linux so I will likely not get very far without serious hands-on mentoring. I will keep things at X.5.8 and clone the system but your suggestions will help me experiment later.
I have a fair bit of experience back-porting stuff to old OSes, so if you run into issues I may be able to offer some more suggestions.