On Sep 13, 2005, at 7:29 PM, Kelly Harding wrote:
Hi,
I've recently acquired a G3/233 'beige' MT. I'm intending to use it
for
general web browsing and email (firefox and thunderbird) and put OS X
10.2 (or possibly 10.3 if i can get it to work with XpostFacto) on it.
I'm intending to hook it up to my 21" CRT and USB keyboard and
mouse via
a Belkin USB 2 port KVM (the version with built in cabling).
Hopefully there shouldn't be any problems with the USB
keyboard/mouse/KVM. The G3 has a PCI USB card in it already I should
add. It also came with 2 SCSI cards (one Atto the other Adaptec).
Since USB support isn't part of the beige ROM, using a USB keyboard
means you cannot apply boot-time key sequences, such as holding down
the C-key to boot from a CD, or Command-Option-P-R to reset the PRAM,
or hold the mouse button down to eject a recalcitrant CD. The KVM
almost certainly doesn't support he current video out without an
adapter (the native video on this system uses the old Mac video out,
not VGA)
ADB keyboards are cheap enough, you should find one and at least keep
it handy for those times you may need to do that.
Possible problem I have noted however is max. screen resolution of the
on board graphics on these G3s.
I've got a Matrox G400/450 PCI card that I'm currently using in an old
dual pentium pro machine, which I intend to retire to being a headless
file-server, hence the Matrox card will be free to use elsewhere.
Would it be possible to use this card in the G3? I've looked on
Matrox's
site and can see firmware available, but am not sure how best to go
about flashing the firmware on it to get it to work properly?
Matrox doesn't make Mac compatible cards. Their 'Unified Drivers for
Most Major Operating Systems' list Windows 95, Win 2k , NT 4, WinXP
and OS/2 as the ' major Operating Systems'.
That's like saying 'We're multiple platform: our software runs on
Dells , Gateways AND H.P.'s"
A Mac Radeon 7000 should work, and they're available relatively
cheap. Numerous flashed versions of those are around as well.
I'll also caution you. The system you've got is the absolute minimum
system ever supported for OS X. At the very least you're going to
need 512 or 768 megs of RAM (the max that can go into a beige G3) to
run it even mildly acceptably. (and that presupposes a great
tolerance for tai-chi computing)
If you actually want to use OS X usefully, even for web and e-mail, a
faster system would serve you better.
--
Bruce Johnson
"No matter where you go, there you are", B. Banzai
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