Project: Snow Leopard on PowerPC Macs ?

[naquaada]

I just got out my Powerbook G4 again and it works rather fine. I want to use MorphOS on it, but this OS isn't useable for everything, so OS X is still neccessary. I have really nice Leopard 10.5.8 installation now, but it's painfully slow if you're browsing in the internet, YouTube is fully impossible. Playing a normal avi is also not funny. I know from my OSx86 systems that Snow Leopard is the fastest OS X ever, so is the question: Will it be possible to make it work on PowerPC Macs? I searched a lot, some say it might, some say it won't, some say that some applications like the Finder are Intel only and whatever. At least, Shmexytaco created a thread about a Snow Leopard PowerPC kernel. It's some time ago, but at least there were some people interested. And getting Snow Leopard to work on a PowerPC Mac they would be much more usueable because there's a lot more software for Snow Leopard.

 

The main part is of course the Snow Leopard kernel. The installer media should be created on an USB stick. It's possible to boot from USB devices on a PowerPC Mac, but you have to do it from the Open Firmware which has a rather strange command set. The installer stick should be as optimized as possible, that no updates can ruin the setup. This would be my ideas:

 

- PowerPC bootloader

- 10.6.8 PowerPC kernel

- removal of all Intel code

- removal of all Intel-Mac-only kexts

- removal of iChat

- removal of the App Store

- removal of Rosetta

- all updates and security updates included

- additional software updates like iTunes, Quicktime and Safari included

- will 'Startup Volume' preferences pane of Snow Leopard work with Apple Partition Table?

- replacement of incompatible software with working versions of Leopard

- the tool 'Monolingual' should be installed, to delete unneccessary languages (.lproj) in system files. This saves about 90.000 files and 30.000 folders!

 

Installer Setup:

 

- 10.6.8 MBR patch, I think this allows installation on all partition tables

- maybe exchange of 'Startup Volume' utility

- all languages and printer drivers will be kept

- printer drivers not selected by default

- X11 and Quicktime 7 selected by default

 

Well, this would be like back in the days as everybody created an own installation DVD...

 

So, what do you think about this? Would it be possible to install Snow Leopard on an PowerPC Mac? At least we installed OS X on PC hardware. And Snow Leopard should have enough 32bit Universal Binary code to work on a G4.

And of course, there's the aspect of making use of PowerPC Macs. Only with Leopard they're nearly unusuable. With Snow Leopard it would be more interesting.

 

Greets, naquaada.