iBench is a synthetic benchmark program for the Mac OS X operating system. It is constituted by 21 tests (12 of integer workload and 9 of floating point) of real usage that allow to check and compare the CPU and memory performance of your Mac.

iBench is a Universal Binary and works seamlessly on 32- and 64-bit Macs and on both Intel and PowerPC Macs.

The only requirements are 512 MB of RAM or more and Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”.

Best of all it’s freeware. So, if you are looking to compare the performance of your Mac against other Macs, I suggest you give this nice little app a try.

Download and more info Here.

When I had my MDD G4 PowerMac I had both OS X and Fedora Linux installed on it. Now, with my MacBook Pro, I have Linux Mint installed. Is one OS enough for you, or do you have another one piggybacking on your Mac?

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The recent seed of OS X 10.6 (Build:10A222) to developers has brought about rumors. Rumors of PowerPC support being an optional install instead of being systematically bundled with the OS. This news along with rumors that Snow Leopard may only run on Intel machines is making me and my G4 nervous.

However, most common apps have already become Universal Binaries, which means that they are able to run natively on both PPC and Intel machines. So, even though the last PowerPC machine shipped from Apple less then three years ago, PowerPC users may be quite upset when they find out that their PowerMac G5′s and PowerBook G4′s will not be able to take advantage of the new OS from Apple.

Last week I wrote an article about bringing life into your old macs. This weekend we are gonna go a step further. Many of you may know that linux distros are perhaps some of the least demanding when it comes to hardware, so, here are the top 3 Linux distros that can put the power back into your PPC mac.

1. openSUSE – openSUSE 11.0, which is sponsored by Novell, is a linux distro that is aimed at the average computer user. It comes with both KDE 4.0 and GNOME 2.22 (Graphical User Interfaces) as included options. However, if you are using openSUSE on a computer more then a few years old you may want to look into installing less demanding, more lightweight UI’s such as Xfce.
2. Fedora – Fedora offers a more demanding and cutting edge experience as compared to other distros. It is full of unique an intuitive applications and lots of new features that may not show up in other operating systems for many months. Fedora offers a very powerful and elegant interface that is a breeze to both use and learn. Fedora is a very powerful and flexible system with close to two million users worldwide.
3. Ubuntu – Ubuntu is a very popular distro that gained its fame through its ease of use. Its popularity makes finding support as well as applications very easy. The bad news however is that Ubuntu recently stopped releasing PPC versions of its distro. April of 2008 was when Ubuntu released Hardy Heron (8.04), the last version that supported PPC processors.