Tag: MacOS

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Mac Pro 3,1 with OpenCore Legacy Patcher – not much success

I previously shared that I was attempting to upgrade my 2008 Mac Pro to a later version of MacOS using OpenCore Legacy Patcher. Unfortunately I had zero success. I tried initially with Big Sur, but I couldn’t get it to boot OpenCore from the USB stick, so at the point from Recovery when I tried to install it said it wasn’t supported on this Mac. Tried following multiple guides but no luck.

I tried stepping backwards through previous versions – Catalina installed but core dumped on booting. Mojave core dumped when booting the installer.

I don’t have a tremendous urgency to upgrade this Mac, it’s getting a bit slow with Chrome on current websites, so I went to eBay and this happened instead:

I picked up a rather well spec’d Mac Pro 2013 for £270, and other than it took a week for it to arrive, it seems to be running pretty well so far.

So now the question is do I try and use OpenCore again to install something beyond Monterey? I think I’ll enjoy Monterey for a while and maybe play around with some different versions in VMs instead 🙂

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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 …

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Mac OS X and MacOS versions

As someone who tinkers with older Macs, I often forget which versions of Mac OS X are earlier or later just based on name, so for future reference here’s a quick list (summarized from wikipedia):

10.0Cheetah
10.1Puma
10.2Jaguar
10.3Panther
10.4Tiger
10.5Leopard
10.6Snow Leopard
10.7Lion
10.8Mountain Lion
10.9Mavericks
10.10Yosemite
10.11El Capitan – most recent version that can be installed on my 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 without using DosDude’s Patcher or OpenCore Legacy Patcher etc
10.12Sierra
10.13High Sierra
10.14Mojave
10.15Catalina
11Big Sur
12Monterey
13Ventura – new System Settings replaced System Preferences
14Sonoma
15Sequoia
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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:

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