On Friday 05 September 2003 04:19 am, Nick wrote: > No new Macs will boot into 9.
This is one of the main reasons why I am still a fan of the "black case" G3s. I have a Wallstreet PDQ, but the Lombard and (better yet) Pismo are also great machines. If you absolutely have to have a G4 get a TiBook...those are going to start getting cheaper. In addition, with a TiBook or a black G3 you get PCMCIA card slots. Apple seems to have phased them out in favor of relying on USB and FireWire periphs, but there is nothing like a PCMCIA Compact Flash adaptor, for example, to help you get your pictures off your digital camera. Transfer times are way better for PCMCIA than for either USB or (gag!) serial port. It works almost as fast as a hard drive to hard drive transfer, which is not surprising considering that CF is an IDE device just like your hard drive. With the TiBook, also, there is the problem of the titanium case interfering with the AirPort antenna. Put a Cardbus 802.11b or 802.11g card in the PCMCIA slot and you are good to go. Especially if you also have a card which allows hookup of an external antenna. Any "black case" G3 will still boot MacOS 9 just fine. If my memory serves me right, the same case exists with the TiBook. However, the Ti is a bit fragile, and requires a lot of TLC to keep going right. The black G3s are a bit more sturdy, although the classic "hinge problem" is a bugaboo with all of them, as is the auto-eject mechanism on the Wallstreet. <shiver> BTW WallyNavi, my Wallstreet PDQ, is very happy with Yellow Dog Linux. YDL is kind of fiddly to install, although my friends in Santa Barbara Linux User Group (yes I live in LA but I am a member of SBLUG because they are just a lot nicer and a lot more helpful than the membership of San Fernando Valley LUG and Simi-Conejo LUG have been) assure me that it was a lot more fiddly in the beginning. You basically have to put several Linux kernels into your System Folder and install a control panel/extension/app combo (BootX) to turn your MacOS 9 install into a dual-boot MacOS 9/Linux install. Once you get to New World Macs it's a lot easier to install...Open Firmware doesn't care what your OS is, just so long that it is bootable. The Lombard on up are New World Macs so everything's cool. I have even had great success with OpenOffice.Org, the Free/Open Source office suite that gives MS Office a serious run for its money and writes valid MS Office 97/98/2000/2001/XP/X files...and it's GRATIS too, folks! After using it for a whole year or so on Linux on x86 machines it's great to have it run on a Mac. OO.Org does have a MacOS X version, but it doesn't run under Quartz...you have to install the Apple X11 Services to have it work there. Under Linux and under Windows (yes! It does Windows) it basically Just Works (tm). Once you add Linux to a Mac that is just not cut out for MacOS X, you have a UNIX-like operating system of your own that is stable, crash-resistant, multi threaded, has preemptive multi-tasking and all the other goodies that make MacOS X such a joy to work with. You also get about 98% of the apps that people running Linux on x86 machines do...the other 2% of the apps that don't recompile for Linux are the same that don't recompile for MacOS X. Those usually have x86-dependent code or don't survive the "endianness flip" gracefully. To explain "endianness" there is a great entry at http://www.everything2.com/ . Unfortunately I can't figure out a way to give you a direct link. This means that in this period when people are moving away from creating programs that will run under MacOS 9 and below and basically moving their Mac software to only support X, the main way that X-challenged Macs can remain useful is to dual boot a PPC Linux distro. Yellow Dog is not the only PPC Linux distro...there is Mandrake 9.1 PPC now, which I haven't tried, and there is Debian PPC and even Debian 68K which are the best options for those Macs a bit too old to run Yellow Dog. On the 68K end there is also NetBSD which is a great thing for any old 68K machine with a PMMU and a FPU. In all cases of "Old World" Macs, you have to have a Classic MacOS boot partition and run BootX as a loader. You can't get around that. Once you get around the fiddlyness of installing Linux using BootX to load the "installation kernel" everything else is fairly easy. WallyNavi is still up in Santa Barbara because it's getting some tuning and some attention from my Linux guru friends. But I look forward to having it back down again and showing the x86 snobs at SFVLUG (they aren't all that way...one of the leaders even has an iBook now) how evil 'leet my Black G3 PowerBook of Doom is. Anyone for a Wardrive? ^_^ -- Michelle Klein-Hass Box 2273, Van Nuys, CA 91404-2273 Brought to you by Linux, KDE and KMail...try it, you'll like it! -- G-Books is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Check our web site for refurbished PowerBooks | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-Books list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-books.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-books%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
