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Adventures with OS X Mavericks in 2025

Running OS X Mavericks on an old mid 2013 MacBook Air

Specs of the Macbook Air

  • 1.3 GHz Intel Core i5
  • 4 Gb 1600 MHz DDR memory
  • Intel HD Graphincs 5000
  • 13 inch TFT LED 1440x900 display
  • 128 GB SSD

Apart from the Apple keyboard layout, the keyboard is fine.

The glass trackpad (without buttons) is quite large. Unfortunately, Apple keyboards don't come with a TrackPoint like ThinkPads do, but the glass trackpad will do fine.

OS X Mavericks

Sometime ago I did a factory reset on this old MacBook. This installs the default operating system, which is OS X Mavericks. The old MacBook Air works fine with it. The laptop doesn't feel old, everything is snappy and the display is a joy to look at.

I decided not to upgrade to a newer version of OS X, or replace it with Linux or one of the BSDs. I like the look and feel of OS X Mavericks, it doesn't require an iCloud account to run, and it is completely different from my daily drivers: ThinkPads running FreeBSD with the ratpoison window manager, and FreeBSD with the Emacs X Window Manager "EXWM".

Of course running an old system has it challenges.

Here follows some information about the software I installed, and other stuff.

MacPorts

It's hardly believable, MacPorts is available for OS X Mavericks!

Using MacPorts I installed the following packages:

  • Emacs 30.2 under X11
  • GnuPG 2.4.8
  • Hunspell
  • Links
  • Lynx
  • OpenSSH
  • OpenSSL
  • RCS
  • Tmux
  • Xorg

See also my page Spellcheck in Emacs on OS X Mavericks with MacPorts.

Firefox

Using Firefox Dinasty I installed Firefox 144.0b5, with the help of and the links from the Mavericks Forever website.

This installs Firefox together with the tools to open websites that require a modern TLS encrypted connection.

Software from the Macintosh Garden and the Macintosh Repository

The Macintosh Garden and the Macintosh Repository are brilliant sources of software for older MacOS and Mac OS X systems.

Using these sources I installed:

Version 3.2.15 of NetNewsWire, a graphical RSS feed reader.

Version 2.0 β5 of [Notational Velocity. See my page on Notational Velocity.

Pages 5.2.2.

Karabiner

Karabiner remaps Apple keyboard keys.

I installed version 10.22 using this web-archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20190809131630/https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/files/Karabiner-10.22.0.dmg

Switching the Fn-key and the left Control-key is a real game-changer, it makes using the MacBook much easier.

BTW: To use Option as Alt-key in the Apple's Terminal application (part of OS X Mavericks), check the option "Use Option as Meta key" in the preferences.

iTunes

OS X Mavericks comes with iTunes 12.6. I prefer the look and feel of the older iTunes that comes with OS X 10.3.9.

However, iTunes 12.6 is still usable. It doesn't try to convert your mp3 files to another format and it doens't require iCloud. This version of iTunes is still a very usefule tool to organise your mp3 files into an "Artist / Album / Tracks" directory structure.

VNC client

OS X Mavericks also comes with a VNC client, which is called "Screen Sharing". This works fine, and is useful to manage virtual machines running a graphical user interface.

See my page Manage remote vm-bhyve guests with OS X Mavericks VNC client.

Resources

Useful resources:

Kudos

Originally my idea was to have some fun with this old laptop and be done with it. Thanks you, Andreas for the inspiration go further and turn this system with OS X Mavericks into a really usable machine, and providing me useful pointers!

Tags:

⇽ Notational Velocity on OS X Mavericks

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