With OS X 10.11 El Capitan, Apple continues its annual march to newer, better, more powerful versions of Mac OS X. Best of all, El Capitan runs on the same Macs that support OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, 10.9 Mavericks, or 10.10 Yosemite.

First of all, all of the below are regarded as hacks. If you end up with bricked Mac Pro, then it’s your own silly fault. None of this stuff is qualified. You’re building what I refer to as a “Frankenmac”.

History Part of my day job is building Pro Tools rigs for high-end customers. Microsoft word for mac compatibility mode. They can afford the best, so I get to tinker with the latest Avid qualified hardware and software available: “iAshtray” Mac Pros, tank-like rack mounted Sonnet chassis, HDX or HD Native cards etc. All fully qualified, just the way I like it. This is all jolly nice for my clients, but my own personal 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 with a Cinema display (purchased from a friend for a pittance) sits there languishing quite a few operating systems behind on OSX Lion 10.7.5 running Pro Tools 10.3.10 HD. Bugger I’d read that some very clever folk had managed to persuade an old Mac Pro to run Mountain Lion and then Mavericks, and searching the Interwebs, I did indeed find a number of solutions that seemed to require entering a lot of commands in Terminal, creating boot partitions and generally patting your head and chewing gum at the same time.

So I decided to wait a wee while until I found a more elegant solution. The wait seems to have been worth it, as I now have my poor old machine running on OSX Yosemite 10.10.2 and Pro Tools 11.3.1 The main restriction for a 2006/7 Mac Pro is that it was designed to boot into a 32-bit environment, even though a lot of the internal hardware was 64-bit capable. The clever bunnies out there in the Wild World Webby, have managed to fool a Ye Olde Mac Pro to run in 64 bit EFI.

Things that you will need: • A Mac Pro 1,1 or 2,1 Cheese grater desktop with OSX Lion 10.7.5 system drive • 8GB USB drive • A graphics card better than a GT120, I used a Radeon HD 5770, original mac version with its appropriate power cable. There are flashed PC cards out there, but they won’t display a boot screen.

I like a boot screen, so I purchased a proper Apple card (2nd hand) • We are sorry but the pre patched version of OSX Yosemite 10.10 is no longer available. It would appear that Apple have asked for it to be taken down. • Either boot.efi file downloadable here.

Black is a white Apple on a black background and Grey is the traditional Apple boot screen: • Black: Sorry no longer available • Grey: Sorry no longer available • I chose the black screen as I dual boot into OSX Lion 10.8.5 or Yosemite 10.10.2. The black screen tells me instantly that I’m booting into Yosemite. • A spare hard drive, mechanical or SSD for the new system drive. You could partition your old Lion drive, but I prefer to build on drive that’s minty fresh.

If I stuff anything up, I can always boot back to my untouched Lion system drive. Contingency plan • A download of Yosemite 10.10.1 or 10.10.2 Combo updaters • A download of Diskmaker X All of the above cost me around $200 US, I had a spare 1TB 7200 rpm SATA drive, USB drives are cheap and seem to breed like rabbits. They also seem to disappear down the black hole that guitar picks, iLok 2 lids and single socks end up. Preparation I’m going to assume that you’re booting from your old Lion system drive, so go ahead and download all the bits and bobs from the links above.

Depending on your internet speed, this may take some time, so make a nice pot of tea. If you’re in Australia, as I am, you have plenty of time to make a nice batch of scones with jam and cream, thanks to our advanced network infrastructure. Once you’ve finished downloading, place the files somewhere safe, it could be on a USB drive etc I popped the files on one of my media drives temporarily so I could access them from my old system drive or my new system drive. (yet to be created, mwahhahaha) Hardware Installation.

Open up your Mac Pro, take the nasty GT120 graphics card out and pop in the ATI Radeon 5770. This card takes its power from the motherboard, so make sure you’ve got the correct power cable. Install your new system drive, but leave the Lion drive in for the moment. I usually put new, unformatted drives in bay 4 Just so I know Reboot your rig into OSX Lion and make sure the new graphics card is AOK. You could format your new system drive at this stage as well. Call it something like “Yosemite HD” or “Kevin” if you wish.

Double and triple check that you’re formatting the correct drive (Doh) Bay 4, remember?? Software Installation. Open up Lion Diskmaker X and follow the instructions to create a bootable USB “special” Yosemite installer from the big Yosemite image you download before. This is the patched version of Yosemite. Don’t install the Apple App store version as this does not have ze patch This can take some time, so be patient and do something useful for the planet, like knitting a vest for our wee penguins on Phillip Island.