iLife 06 and G3 processor and rant about Pacifist.app

After cobbling together an iBook (long story, but iBook in question is 600Mhz G3 with 100Mhz bus (as opposed to 600Mhz with 66Mhz bus that would make it much closer to molasses) 40 gig HD and combo drive), and throwing a clean install of 10.4.5 onto it today, I proceeded to turn it into a master disk image.

Every once in a blue moon I create an up to date install of OS with all the apps, system configured how I like it, accounts set up as I like them, and then use asr to back them onto an external hard drive. Then, in event I need to quickly roll out a system or recover from disaster I’d just need to asr the image back.

Two words about asr. Personally, I love asr. It can act as a poor man’s backup tool to create an identical bootable disk on a different drive (especially useful if you have some sort of bootable CD/DVD from which you can boot, as then asr would use fast block copy to copy data from disk to disk). Coincidentially, vast majority of macs (Let’s not talk about x86 ones. I am not yet sure I like them) supports firewire disk target mode. asr is also useful in creating and restoring from disk images.

Sadly for things like recovery disk I tend to use junky drives, as it’s not really a priority, just convinience, and coincidentially there is no funding for it. A disk with my last image died, so I decided to take advantage of the opportunity, as I were setting up a new system from scratch, with no baggage of software archeologies.

When I put in iLife 06 DVD into iBook and attempted to install it, I were told that iLife 06 only works with G4 and up processors.

So not being deferred, I’ve used Pacifist (See rant about Pacifist at the bottom) to extract iMovie package into a folder, to see what it is that Apple is trying to do on me.

I’ve talked about Fat files and lipo earlier, in case you feel like a review.

So a quick check with lipo confirmed what Apple is saying…. the compiled the binary for G4 and x86 processors only, obsoleting G3s. *sigh* First the cut off was presence of Firewire, then with iWork 05 (which was like 650 megs, yet shipped on DVD) it was presence of DVD, but now it’s G4 and up. I got to give a credit to the marketing/built in obsolescence people at Apple – they are good!

stany@Ghostwheel:~/Desktop/Root/Applications/iMovie HD.app/Contents/MacOS[03:46 AM]$ lipo -detailed_info iMovie HD 
Fat header in: iMovie HD
fat_magic 0xcafebabe
nfat_arch 2
architecture i386
    cputype CPU_TYPE_I386
    cpusubtype CPU_SUBTYPE_I386_ALL
    offset 4096
    size 3217924
    align 2^12 (4096)
architecture ppc7400
    cputype CPU_TYPE_POWERPC
    cpusubtype CPU_SUBTYPE_POWERPC_7400
    offset 3223552
    size 3327624
    align 2^12 (4096)
stany@Ghostwheel:~/Desktop/Root/Applications/iMovie HD.app/Contents/MacOS[03:46 AM]$ 

7400 is, of course, G4.

Attempts to run it generate ldynamic linker errors:

stany@Ghostwheel:~/Desktop/Root/Applications/iMovie HD.app/Contents/MacOS[03:46 AM]$ ./iMovie HD 
dyld: incompatible cpu-subtype
Trace/BPT trap
stany@Ghostwheel:~/Desktop/Root/Applications/iMovie HD.app/Contents/MacOS[03:54 AM]$

Now a quick rant about Pacifist.

Dear Charles Srstka.

I like Pacifist. I’ve not registered it using a pirated serial, and see 15 second time out each time I start it. One of these days I’ll even send you some money to support your effort (which seem to have been stalled since 2004). But, can you give me an answer to one question: Why the heck does Pacifist ask for administrator password each time one attempts to extract a file out of a package? Shouldn’t it only do that if one doesn’t have write permissions to the folder one is extracting files into? If I have read/write rights to files in package and to Desktop onto which I want to extract package’s contents, why does Pacifist want my password? Isn’t that getting users used to Pavlovian response of typing in admin password every time there is a prompt on screen, regardless of the need?
Please, think of the users, esp in view of the recent series of Mac OS worms that also ask for admin passwords.

Damn, if you fix it to actually check (and tell user why) if it needs admin password, and e-mail me about it, I’ll buy a license for Pacifist.