Access to machines with old OS versions/architectures, like 10.4, 10.5, ... ppc

Mojca Miklavec mojca at macports.org
Thu Jun 5 08:11:52 PDT 2014


Hi,

I was wondering if there was any chance/interest to set up a bunch of
computers with different architectures and OS versions installed (but
mainly setups like 10.4/PPC, 10.4/i386, 10.5/PPC, 10.6/x86_64) so that
a few trusted developers could have ssh access to those machines in
order to be able to test and fix issues on those machines every now
and then.

I know that these OSes are no longer officially supported and I'm
aware that a lot of software will simply stop working on the old boxes
at some point (Fink uses branches: if new software version doesn't
support the old OS, it stays at the old version; of course there are
drawbacks to that approach as well), but I imagine that there are:
- people or companies willing to donate old functional hardware
- probably some individuals willing to plug them in somewhere
- developers willing to play and nail some of the problems/bugs down

(A similar, but different feature would be a slightly more capable
machine running the latest OS for developers with older hardware and
software.)

Is there anyone else who would find such a setup useful?

Mojca


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