Did another Mac thing! After a false start last night, #OpenSuse#MicroOS is now up and running. And it's blummin' fast for an old girl.
Best part is, it turns out the fastest processor this Mac can take is like £15-20 on eBay. That plus a bit of extra RAM will make this into a tidy little performer. (Not a Performa, sadly.) (Also not that little.)
It's somewhat frustrating that I have 32GB of perfectly usable DDR3 RAM, but the Mac won't boot with it in - either because it's not ECC, or it's slightly too fast. Poopins.
@lunarloony with a 5,1, the only limitation is that you cannot mix ECC and non-ECC, and Registered and non-Registered RAM. It automatically downclocks the memory bus to handle slower RAM. It has no problems with DDR3 that is faster than the CPU is rated for.
@lunarloony it's possible that the RAM is bad, but you can rule that out with a few diagnostics:
a ram failure is indicated by 1 or 3 flashes on the power LED
if you get a bad ram flashing LED, you can determine which DIMM went bad. each ram slot on the processor tray has a red LED beside it - the red led will light up on a bad DIMM.
page 21 also shows the recommended dimm slots depending on the number of dimms you're using. i'm assuming that you have a single-processor tray, so you'll be using slots 1-4.
@lunarloony also - i just remembered this bit of obscure knowledge: you cannot use "Quad Rank" RAM in a 5,1. I have no idea why, but it never seems to work.
For curiosity's sake, I tried my RAM again, DIMM by DIMM, and my Mac didn't like any of it at all. Tried it alongside the RAM it came with (keeping in mind what you said about mixing RAM) and I got a red LED. So... I think I will have to seek out something that will definitely work, because it's clearly not keen on what I already have. Shouldn't be too expensive, though.
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