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The Snow Leopard Thread (OS X 10.6)
- Thread starter MysticCow
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No... I even used browsers with new profiles, empty hosts file, no firewall.
Does anyone have another link for the file? Is it on Macintosh Garden yet?
Thanks. But Google wants me to "log in" to a gmail account, which I don't have.
Any chance you could make the file public access like your ArcticFox, SnowMonkey, etc files?
FWIW I just tried to download the file from Box using Firefox 87 on Mojave, setting box.com and boxcdn.net to temporarily trusted in NoScript and... it doesn't work either.
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Yes I can verify that the mid-2011 Mac Mini which I purchased in September, 2011 could not have Snow Leopard installed into it, until I discovered the work of newfoundglory!
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SnowLeopard is my personal use-it-every-day OS.
I have spent some time making the main toolchains work quite well on SnowLeopard, and you will find on MacPorts a collection of clang versions from clang-3.3 to clang-11 that work well.
There is also a nice, fairly recent, libc++ that installs onto SnowLeopard and lets it do things that even more recent macOS versions have trouble doing.
On the gcc front, we have apple's gcc-4.2 all the way to gcc11 (current).
The cctools and ld64 versions available for SnowLeopard are very recent (Xcode 11 vintage).
I ported over the last possible (so far) version of qt5, qt5.3, that we could make work to SnowLeopard. Some newer versions of qt5 would be nice, but the workload curve arcs up sharply.
qt4 works great, and supports quite a lot of software still.
Finally, there is a compatibility library I have been working on called legacysupport that makes the SnowLeopard SDK responsive to features that were often introduced in much later SDK versions (time functions, etc). This lets a lot of quite current open-source software install and work well on SnowLeopard.
Things like Octave, CherryTree, a nice collection of qt5 software, a lot of open-source games, and almost all of the current tools (pdftk, apache2, mysql, etc, etc) work just great, very solid.
I ported TenFourFox to Intel with Riccardo's help back in 2018 and have uploaded the Intel builds since then (built on Tiger Intel for maximum coverage). That ship is unfortunately coming to an end as upstream has no plans to do any significant updating to that branch any longer.
However, I do have webkit2-gtk working on SnowLeopard, and some of the linux browsers (epiphany, for example) will build and run on SnowLeopard (imperfectly so far).
I have spent some time making the main toolchains work quite well on SnowLeopard, and you will find on MacPorts a collection of clang versions from clang-3.3 to clang-11 that work well.
There is also a nice, fairly recent, libc++ that installs onto SnowLeopard and lets it do things that even more recent macOS versions have trouble doing.
On the gcc front, we have apple's gcc-4.2 all the way to gcc11 (current).
The cctools and ld64 versions available for SnowLeopard are very recent (Xcode 11 vintage).
I ported over the last possible (so far) version of qt5, qt5.3, that we could make work to SnowLeopard. Some newer versions of qt5 would be nice, but the workload curve arcs up sharply.
qt4 works great, and supports quite a lot of software still.
Finally, there is a compatibility library I have been working on called legacysupport that makes the SnowLeopard SDK responsive to features that were often introduced in much later SDK versions (time functions, etc). This lets a lot of quite current open-source software install and work well on SnowLeopard.
Things like Octave, CherryTree, a nice collection of qt5 software, a lot of open-source games, and almost all of the current tools (pdftk, apache2, mysql, etc, etc) work just great, very solid.
I ported TenFourFox to Intel with Riccardo's help back in 2018 and have uploaded the Intel builds since then (built on Tiger Intel for maximum coverage). That ship is unfortunately coming to an end as upstream has no plans to do any significant updating to that branch any longer.
However, I do have webkit2-gtk working on SnowLeopard, and some of the linux browsers (epiphany, for example) will build and run on SnowLeopard (imperfectly so far).
When you say webkit2-gtk—do you mean the minibrowser? What's the actual app you're launching? Do you use Quartz or X11?
Every time I've tried to use webkit2-gtk (I've tried the mini browser and epiphany), I've unfortunately found it too buggy to be usable. When pages actually load, they render perfectly, which is great—but that only happens maybe 50% of the time, and the browsers also crash frequently.
webkit2-gtk is the backend for several frontends - minibrowser, epiphany, yelp, and surf come to mind. And it does indeed have these errors when page loading. (That's the "imperfectly" ...). Some things seem to work better, like yelp.
I think the errors are coming from the limited size of the IPC messages allowed in the 10.6.8 kernel, but this kind of debugging is quite hard for me to follow so I haven't been able to make headway on it so far. There are some env vars you can set to allow the IPC messaging to be more visible.
Help appreciated!
I have tried both x11 (usually use this) and quartz, and the issue seems the same to me on both.
I think the errors are coming from the limited size of the IPC messages allowed in the 10.6.8 kernel, but this kind of debugging is quite hard for me to follow so I haven't been able to make headway on it so far. There are some env vars you can set to allow the IPC messaging to be more visible.
Help appreciated!
I have tried both x11 (usually use this) and quartz, and the issue seems the same to me on both.
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Huh! If so, the 10.9.5 kernel must have the same limitation, because I encounter the same errors there.
Hello Kencu, it would be nice to have a guide on how to setup a very good MacPorts setup for SnowLeopard users that seek building newer ports.
Stll am at loss with newer mpv version, and this program would build nicely some months ago if not mistaken.
Stll am at loss with newer mpv version, and this program would build nicely some months ago if not mistaken.
Java 1.8 requires 10.7; if you need a newer (newer than Java 6 anyways) version of Java, someone did figure out how to install Java 7 on Snow Leopard: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13536667/how-to-install-java-jdk-7-on-snow-leopard
Also, NetNewsWire is listed as a Usenet app, when it is actually an RSS app. A Usenet app that is still useable with 10.6 is Unison from Panic.
Thank you for the comment. Can Unison be used for downloading YT videos? I've just installed it now but it asked for server credentials. Where to get the server credentials?
Meanwhile Java 1.8 became the minimum version to run Java apps. Java 1.7 no longer cuts it.
Unison is an app for Usenet -- specifically, for browsing and reading Newsgroups. To use it, you'll need a Usenet account, which were usually given out for free with ISP accounts in the 90s-00s (but aren't anymore).
You can search Google for free Usenet servers (the paid ones are faster, keep posts for longer and also usually afford access to the alt.binaries newsgroups) but here is a good place to start: https://greycoder.com/best-free-usenet-servers/
You may also want to give MR’s PPC/Early Intel community’s PPCMC 7.2.6 a spin. This is what I use for grabbing and archiving music videos from YT and elsewhere (and I do mean elsewhere). It won’t work in Lion, but I use it on 10.6.8 and it works quite well.
Spotify just sent an email saying that older clients prior to 2017 will lose access on January 15th 2023. Can a workaround be found on SL?
Spotify is an unneeded and useless platform to begin with. Even their website is useless, can't imagine how much of a crap their app might be. Comparison. Youtube is useful for listening to music on Internet. iTunes is a useful plus practical app for playing music on desktop.