But you don’t have to install this alternative UEFI boot manager on your Mac. REFInd should allow you to boot those USB drives if you install it on your Mac. There’s a reason Ubuntu recommends just burning a disc. For example, Ubuntu offers some painstaking instructions that involve converting the USB drive’s file system and making its partitions bootable, but some people report these instructions won’t work for them. While you can connect an external CD/DVD drive to your Mac and boot from standard Linux live CDs and USBs, simply connecting a Linux live USB drive created by standard tools like Universal USB Installer and uNetbootin to a Mac won’t work. Or you could consider selling your old Mac and migrating to an Intel-based model that supports OS X 10.10 Yosemite and probably remain up-to-date until Fall 2015, at which point OS X 10.11 could leave you behind.RELATED: How to Create Bootable USB Drives and SD Cards For Every Operating SystemĪpple’s made it difficult to boot non-Mac OS X operating systems off of USB drives. See DistroWatch and PenguinPPC for information on current Linux distributions for PowerPC Macs. The best alternative for those who wish to use their PowerPC Macs and have an up-to-date operating system is a PPC port of Linux. Security updates for each of these versions of OS X was ended years ago, so even though there has been very little Mac malware since the introduction of OS X, these are not as secure on the Web as more recent versions of OS X. It will seem sluggish on G3 Macs below about 500 MHz and performance on a 400 MHz G4 is about the cut-off there.Īlthough there are still some apps being developed for PowerPC Macs running OS X 10.4 and 10.5 (most notably the TenFourFox browser), there is very little up-to-date software. It is not as resource intensive and will perform decently with as little as 512 MB of RAM.

You’ll also want at least 1 GB of RAM for decent performance, a twice that to really unleash things.įor lower powered G4 Macs and the vast majority of G3 Macs, OS X 10.4 Tiger is your best bet. That said, OS X Leopard requires a lot of power, so you’ll probably find Macs below 667 MHz sluggish regardless of other factors.

More specifically, OS X 10.5 Leopard is the last version of OS X that will run on G5 Macs, and it will run on almost all G4 Macs as well, although you will need to hack the installer to get it on a system slower than 867 MHz.

They will only run on Intel x86 hardware. With the introduction of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in August 2009, Apple removed all support for PowerPC Macs from its operating system.

Can you install linux on a mac os x