On Dec 27, 2008, at 9:21 PM, Darin Sheriff wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I have recently had the good fortune to acquire a beige powermac G3
> and plan on putting os 9.2 on it and also os 10.2 Jaguar. I am also
> looking for a way to make it wireless and I have seen some wireless
> PCI cards on ebay that are airport extreme compatible. Does anyone
> know if these cards work with a beige powermac?
>
It will be hard to find any modern card that works with OS 9. Most
modern cards can be tweaked to work with OS X, but having a current
version of OS X helps, so if you're looking for a cheap card, you
better install 10.4.11 on this Beige using XPostFacto 4. You may be
able to find an 802.11b card that works in both OS 9 & OS X Jaguar,
but I'm not aware what that card is?
The Beige is a very difficult Mac for OS X. You should read the
XPostFacto forums before installing. You've got a 1st 8 GB limitation
on OS X native booting installations, but you can install onto larger
partitions outside the 1st 8 GB by using an XPF "helper disk" to boot
with. A good strategy for the Beige is to get a PCI Firewire 400 card
and boot from external Firewire HDs. This eliminates the 1st 8 GB
issue and the 128GB total HD size limitation, plus gets you faster HD
access at a price cheaper than a Mac bootable ATA card that supports
larger than 128GB HDs.
You'll need a Radeon PCI card so that you can enable Quartz Extreme
with PCI Extreme 3.1. Without the Radeon, it will struggle with simple
graphics tasks like fast scrolling of complex webpages.
If you're installing OS X beyond Jaguar you should subscribe and post
questions to the Unsupported OS X list rather than G3-5 list which is
for supported Macs and software.
Honestly, the Beige is very difficult. Unless you have time to tinker
I'd recommend getting any AGP G4 instead. There are so many
idiosyncrasies of the Beige to remember, and they all are time
consuming and frustrating.
As for the PCI Airport card, I use a NetGear WN311B which is a cheap,
modern 802.11n card. It needs a very slight "tweak" to get it
recognized as "Airport", but it works identically as a native Airport
card. The tweak I used was called "bcm43xx_enabler_0.5.1pre.sh.zip"
which you can download it on the web. I don't think any 802.11n cards
will work with anything less than Tiger 10.4?
--~--~-~--~~~---~--~~
You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a
group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on
Power Macs.
The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette
guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml
To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
g3-5-list-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en
Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml
-~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
