And what exactly can it do beyond simply running the OS? Hos stable is it under heavy load?
How fast can it run a 3D raytracer or Final Cut? -----Original Message----- From: Bruce Hoult <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Jul 27, 2005 1:56 AM To: Unsupported OS X <[email protected]> Subject: Tiger success on PDQ G3 PowerBook I'm typing this on my 300 MHz/320 MB/20 GB PDQ PowerBook, runing Tiger 10.4.2. It's been a bit of a battle using XPostFacto 4.0b5 so I thought I should describe what I did and what the problems are in case they can be fixed in a later version. The PDQ is essentially a slightly tweaked WallStreet and is a fully-legacy machine. It has Old World ROMs and serial, SCSI and ADB ports. No built in USB or FireWire here, and it was already unsupported in Panther (which I've been running on it for over a year). The end result seems to be fine so far, with the sole exception that I can't find any way to adjust the screen brightness. The dedicated rocker switch doesn't work (it did in Panther, and the sound volume and mute ones do even in Tiger) and there is no control for it in the System Preferences Displays panel. Also, I'm currently running on batteries but there is no indication of how long I should expect before they are flat. The percentage of charge left looks reasonable though. It may well be that zapping the PRAM and/or reformatting my root partition caused this loss of information and it will be OK after a cycle. I'll see. I don't have any sort of DVD drive for it, and don't have Tiger CDs, so I chose to install Tiger by cloning it from my dual G5 using Carbon Copy Cloner. That was a bit of a challenge. The G5 has FireWire while the PowerBook has SCSI. I have a FireWire PC Card for the PowerBook but it can't boot from it and it doesn't do FireWire Target mode (of course), which is how I installed Tiger onto an old iMac. The current version of Carbon Copy Cloner does not work on Tiger because (from the web site) "Apple updated the authentication sceme [sic] of AppleScript Studio (yea!) and there's a little bit of work to be done to get that part of CCC working again". However I found that it works perfectly if you run it as root e.g. using sudo: sudo /Volumes/Carbon\ Copy\ Cloner/Carbon\ Copy\ Cloner.app/ Contents/MacOS/Carbon\ Copy\ Cloner The PDQ is one of the machines that must have the OSX root partition lie entirely within the first eight gigabytes of a disk, so I have my 20 GB disk partitioned into a 7.0 GB partition (called "/") for OSX and an 11.6 GB partition (called "BrucePB") for OS9 and data. I find 7 GB is very tight for OSX with a lot of apps installed and I was constantly running out of space once I got into swap a bit (more below on how I alleviate that), so I have /Users symlinked to /Volumes/BrucePB/Users. This also helps with installing new OS versions as I can temporarily remove the symlink for extra safety. If space gets tight again I'll move /Applications to the other partition as well but I haven't needed to yet. My plan for installing Tiger involved nuking everything on the root partition except for 3rd party apps and then using CCC to clone a working Tiger ove the top of those applications. Once it was going with dummy users I'd reinstate the /Users symlink to my real data. That means that for a time the PowerBook would not have a bootable OSX on its internal disk (it would have OS9), but since CCC needs OSX I'd need to have a bootable OSX on an external disk. I was not able to get XPostFacto's "helper disk" technique to work reliably enough to trust it to temporarily have my only bootable OS for the PowerBook be on a FireWire drive hanging off a PC Card. After cloning Tiger from the G5 (and testing that the G5 could boot from it), the first time I tried it on the PowerBook it booted and worked fine (though I needed the PatchedRagePro driver, just as I do for Panther) but I was then totally unable to get it to boot again in about twenty attempts. Sometimes it would hang with "still waiting for root device", sometimes it would get to right before the desktop pattern changes just before the login window comes up. I decided to see if I could get Tiger booting from an external SCSI disk. The problem being that the largest one I have is only 3 GB while my cloned copy of Tiger on the FireWire drive was over 5 GB although that did include things such as the developer tools. I cloned everything of Tiger except /System and /Developer from the FireWire drive to the SCSI drive and then went through and deleted almost everything in /Applications and X11 and printer drivers and a few other things and got enough space to clone the 1.5 GB of /System over as well. I was then able to boot the stripped down Tiger on the SCSI drive and use it for a while (running applications from other disks) to make sure it worked OK and would boot reliably before nuking Panther off the internal disk. Into the home straight now. Booted in Tiger from the external SCSI drive, cloned Panther from the internal drive to a spare prtition on the external firewire drive (just in case I decide to put it back later), deleted everything but 3rd party applications from the 7 GB partition of the internal drive, cloned the original (not stripped down) Tiger onto that partition from the FireWire drive, rebooted onto the new Tiger on the internal drive. Easy. Except there is one more problem. I seem to keep having problems booting from a partition the first time after cloning to it. I keep getting hangs and have to play around to make it work. But once it works once it's fine from then on. I haven't convinced myself 100%, but I think there may be a pattern involving the PatchedRagePro driver. It seems that perhaps I have to boot from the partition one time with PatchedRagePro not selected and just accept the video artifacts (16 bit mode has totally screwed up colours -- see http://www.hoult.org/bruce/rainbow.jpg -- while 32 bit mode has a purple cast in areas of the screen that have been redrawn), and then enable PatchedRagePro for the next boot. But I didn't keep good enough records of what I was trying to be sure of that. I also have a feeling that it may help to run XPostFacto from OS9 when switching from one copy of OSX to another. But, again, I'm not at all sure of this. -- Unsupported OS X is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Unsupported OS X list info <http://lowendmac.com/lists/unsupported.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/unsupportedosx%40mail.maclaunch.com/> iPod Accessories for Less at 1-800-iPOD.COM Fast Delivery, Low Price, Good Deal www.1800ipod.com -- Unsupported OS X is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Unsupported OS X list info <http://lowendmac.com/lists/unsupported.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/unsupportedosx%40mail.maclaunch.com/> iPod Accessories for Less at 1-800-iPOD.COM Fast Delivery, Low Price, Good Deal www.1800ipod.com
