[G4] Amazing What These G4s Can Do (Request About Xcode)

[charles phillips]

All -

Just reporting on a bit of progress. 

Certainly those among us who are still using G4 Macs are FAR behind the times. However, I just completed a quest that people may find cheering. 

I have a MDD 1.4 GHz - and a iBook G4 as well - and wanted to run some orbital mechanics software that I knew ran under Unix. I know that the right way to do this is to go get an updated Mac with the Intel processor, but I figured that I would have the same questions on the newer hardware. So why not see if the software was what I needed - on computers I already owned???

This software runs in Unix and so I had to go on a LONG and STRANGE trip to learn how do run under Unix, how to find the application, how to install the application. After posting to various lists, asking many questions, going to many web pages, I found that the Mac community unfortunately is not as helpful as it once was!!

Sure I am asking people for help and not offering to pay them, why should they spend time teaching me? At one time it seemed that people would help you just to expand the playing field. Several people just replied that I should upgrade my hardware (duh!) but did not answer my question about how to do what I wanted to do. Several just pointed me to web pages that I had already said that I had reviewed. 

Oh well. I wanted to run some ported software and as it turns out it is actually very simple. The computers I have are actually still very capable machines.

So I asked how to run Unix applications - and the answer is:

Get your OS disk that you installed on your Mac (I have 10.5.8) and find Xcode Tools in the optional installs. Install that. 

Go to www.macports.org and install MacPorts. This is essentially a giant installer that installs other software. Back on www.macports.org, find the software you want. It will have compressed files that end with .tar.gz so find that one and also find the .html file with the installation command. 

Now it gets scary. Go the Terminal (under Utilities) and start Terminal, go into that and issue the installation command (normally sudo port applicationname) and watch while MacPorts installs the application. This may go fast or it may take a LONG time. If the installation stops, just go back and reissue the sudo command in the Terminal. 

Now many people will scoff at me (as many have already) and say that this is all intrinsically obvious to the casual observer. I spent months learning how to do this. 

Scoff away, I got this running. 

Now I can do some pretty sophisticated orbital analysis on this old relic, and I know that I should get a newer computer and do this again. I can get the newer versions to install and I can run the older versions to make sure that they can do what I need to do. 

I should offer profuse thanks to several people that did NOT scoff, and who did offer help. D VanderYacht (drteknik at earthlink. nxx) was very helpful and told me how to get Xcode. The always resourceful Randy B Singer (randy at macattorney.cxx) was helpful as well. By the way both email addresses have been mangled to prevent various ill gotten software from picking up useable email addresses from this note. Thanks guys, you are what distinguishes Mac people from others!!

I am amazed at how fast these old machines are and how much you can do with them. 

If anyone wants help with this (the directions were by necessity abbreviated) please let me know and I will try to help.

Charles Phillips
Houston, Texas