Upgrading 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 from El Capitan to Big Sur with OpenCore Legacy Patcher

I’ve been running El Capitan, the last officially supported MacOS version on my 2008 Mac Pro for several years. A couple of years back I dipped a toe into using OpenCore Legacy Patcher‘s boot picker to dual boot Proxmox from a separate drive, which has worked well.

It hasn’t been without some GPU related stress though, as at some point between changing monitors (I no longer have the previous monitor to go back to), it was outputting a resolution that wasn’t supported by my new 4k monitor and I couldn’t get a boot screen to appear to be able to select between MacOS or Proxmox, so it was stuck booting Proxmox by default and I ran it headless. This wasn’t too much of an issue as I mainly use the machine for running dev/test VMs and use it as my locally hosted GitLab server.

I did manage to get the resolution issue fixed by remote VNC’ing into the machine while there was no monitor output and change the resolution. Note to self, make sure you have ssh and VNC installed when working with temperamental old hardware.

The only other issue that’s been bothering me for a while is the discontinued support for Chrome updates on old MacOS versions:

10.13 is High Sierra. If I’m going to do something drastic and go for a major unsupported upgrade, I might as well go for the latest version I can install with it still be usable. Opinions vary for the Mac Pro 3,1 but I decided to go with 11, Big Sur:

Fingers crossed. I do have 2 bootable drives with MacOS in this Mac, so if the OpenCore boot picker doesn’t get hosed, I should be at least able to boot El Cap from a second drive and recover from there if needed:

  • ssd 1: El Cap: this is the one I’ll reinstall with OpenCore Legacy Patcher and Big Sur
  • ssd 2: Proxmox
  • hdd 1: El Cap

Hopefully the next update I’ll be able to comment on how successful the install went …

MacOS Sequoia local network access and the new ‘Allow [app name] to find devices on local network’ prompt

After upgrading to Sequoia a number of my installed apps sometime after the first boot popped up a prompt to ‘Allow [app name] to find devices on local network?’. Thinking this was odd I answered no for each of these and didn’t think any more of it. A couple of days later I realized I couldn’t access any websites running locally on my network, for example services running in containers on my Proxmox server. I could still ping their ips and get a response, but Chrome was saying ‘No route to host’.

After some Googling I found some posts with the same issue and it’s related to this prompt for accessing local devices. To enable the access after you’ve already answered no to the popup, go to System Settings, Privacy and Security, Local Network and enable access for any apps that need it:

VMWare Fusion Pro for MacOS and Workstation Pro for Windows now free for personal use

Following Broadcom’s buyout of VMWare, many home users of virtualization software such as VMWare’s ESXi were disappointed that the free personal use was discontinued.

News today however is more promising: from today you can download Fusion Pro for MacOS and Workstation Pro for Windows free for personal use. You need to sign up for an account at support.broadcom.com and then search for either product to download. More details here.

Changing MacOS keybindings for Home/End keys to behave the same as Windows

Sometimes muscle memory is hard to unlearn. I can’t get used to the Home and End keys on a Mac jumping to the top and end of a file instead of start and end of a line. Yes, I know Cmd-left and Cmd-right do the same thing on a Mac, but pressing Home and having it jump to the top of a file is too much for me to handle when in the middle of editing something in an IDE like Eclipse.

To remap the Home and End keys to behave the same as on Windows, make a dir here:

mkdir ~/Library/KeyBindings

and create a file called DefaultKeyBinding.dict (NOTE: this file must be named exactly as shown to work) containing this content:

{
"\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";
"\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLine:";
"$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";
"$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";
}

Logoff and log back on again, and the Home and End keys should now work the same as on Windows. (source here)

If this still doesn’t work in Eclipse, it maybe because Line Start and Line End and explicitly mapped to Cmd-left and Cmd-right – these can be changed in Preferences under Keys:

Delete the existing mappings for Home and End and change to the Home and End keys: