Support for Mac OSX 10.5

[Richard Gaskin]

Mark Schonewille wrote:

 > Perhaps you shouldn't ask this list but some neutral source to find
 > out how many people are really using older systems.

It seems he did both:  before double-checking with the community, he 
cited one of the leading metrics commonly used for identifying OS market 
share, the aggregate stats at NetMarketShare:

<http://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=11&qpaf=&qpcustom=Mac+OS+X+10.5&qpcustomb=0>

It's difficult to find stats that break down OS X usage by version, but 
if you can turn up any recent ones from Chikita or others it would be 
helpful (the most recent I could find from Chikita were more than a year 
and half old).

Looking around at the rest of the Mac developer community for guidance 
shows that Firefox dropped support for 10.5 last year and Chrome dropped 
it in 2012.

Most of Adobe's products currently require 10.6.8, including Flash 
Player which is extremely dangerous to use without being able to keep up 
with critical security updates.

Apple's last version of Leopard was 10.5.8, released in August 2009. 
AFAIK they've released no security updates since then, compounding the 
dangers present by running outdated versions of Flash with a wide range 
of known security exposures Apple has since fixed in supported versions 
of OS X.

If you know of anyone who absolutely must run OS X 10.5, please remind 
them that it's safe only for local work unconnected to the Internet.


Schools needing access to web resources like Wikipedia using systems 
that are unsafe on the Internet can consider inexpensive options like 
the Internet In A Box project to bring critical resources into the 
classroom without external network connections:
<http://internet-in-a-box.org/>


And of course the useful life span of older computers can be greatly 
extended by installing Linux on them.

For example, Xubuntu (the lightweight Ubuntu variant) runs well on most 
older computers, and v12.10 will continue to get security updates 
through October 2015.  Version 14.04 will be released in April, and will 
receive security updates through April 2019.  A PowerPC build of Xubuntu 
is maintained by the Ubuntu community as well for those who need it.

LiveCode runs well on all Ubuntu-based distros v12.10 and later, and on 
many earlier versions as well but since those are no longer receiving 
security updates I can't recommend anything earlier than 12.10.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  Follow me on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/FourthWorldSys