After showing in public a few times already MorphOS running on PowerBook G4 (video on YouTube) and on PowerMac G5 (AVI video), today one of the core developers has released a few screenshots (1, 2, 3, 4) of MorphOS running on an iMac G5 20″ clocked at 2.1GHz and equipped with a Radeon X600 graphic card.
As usual, no promises, let alone a release date, have been given.
Since the iMac G5 is a single core computer it matches perfectly with MorphOS that yet doesn’t support multiple processors. iMac G5s are reasonable priced and don’t consume too much energy.
I would be interested in such a port but am even more waiting for the Powerbook port.
Anyway, nice to see more hardware alternatives
Since Apple is leaving its older PPC based Macs to a slow death by supporting only the X86 based Macs with Snow Leopard (and future versions of OS X), MorphOS may become a viable OS for the sustained life of these systems. This could also bring some active (and exciting) application development from ex-OS X programmers very familiar with their hardware strengths and weaknesses.
Interesting times ahead.
Huh?
The move from PPC OSX to PPC MorphOS is orders of magnitude harder than the move from PPC OSX to x86 OSX. Most OSX developers moved over to x86 eons ago, given that for the most part it was just a recompile away 😉
Still, a good thing to have alternative OSs on end of line HW, but “application support” will probably not the be the reason why people may decide to ditch OSX for MorphOS on a G5. I still remember how BeOS was supposed to give “new life” to all those 604 PPC Macs that Apple had orphaned. 😉
Given that OSX and other Free OSs can be had on G5s for a song, it is always going to be a tough proposition for the Morphos team to get people to shell $100 bucks…
Are the OSS Radeon drivers ported? An iMac with an X600XT wouldn’t bee too bad actually.
Now I know what to do with my old iMac G5!!