My "test machine" and newest project...

Post Reply New Topic

Oh, and Lau, thanks for all your help. I still haven't gotten it working yet, but I'm leaving to go back to school tomorrow so this project is getting put on hold for a while. But I know what I'm doing over spring break! (Oh crap, I'm actually leaving Miami over Spring Break, and coming home to the Midwest so I can screw around with xorg config files... this is not normal college student behavior)

In other news, I attempted to install FreeBSD on the "test machine," since Linux wasn't cooperating. (And yes, I did make sure to download the correct PPC version) I didn't even make it past the partitioner. I'm definitely in over my head in BSD-land.

Off-topic: does anyone know why the Firefox spell-checker would be favouring the British spelling of words? My system is set to American English, AbiWord and OpenOffice prefer American spellings, this is a clean install of Ubuntu as of last night, and my WP posts keep getting spell-checked by FF and it underlines any word that is spelled in the American rather than British style.

Will linux run on PPC processors w/o running like crap. Doing a HD format and reinstalling OSX isn't a bad idea. OSX Tiger runs fine for both G3's and G4's. Ranging from 350Mhz- 1Ghz. Just set up a registry cleaner and free security and your good to go. And set up a paging file 2.5 times our memory.

If I ever learn to configure it properly, yes. Turns out my specific ATI card and Debian don't get along all that well, but others have gotten it working before so I know it can be done.


Ah, but that's not as much fun! This computer got dug out of the basement for me to mess around with more than anything else. If I get it functional, my family will be glad to have an extra back-up computer that can also be a "public" machine, and my dad will get to look around Linux if he's curious. Besides, I'd be surprised to see Tiger run well on this machine, since I had Panther on it and performance was crap. But then, compared to how Windows Vista runs on any modern machine you might not have noticed much difference.

I dont see why it shouldnt, if the kernel is written for it, and its compiled properly.

And the kernel is not the problem, just some X11 configuration and the drivers to go along with it. So I expect that if I ever get this machine running, it will be working quite well.

Actually for computer illiterate people who don't like online shopping a lot buy software from stores. Such as Internet Security, Games, Office Productivty Software, & of course hardware like printers.

I now gets some since in what you are doing. Misunderstanding before, Good Luck.

I'll buy the iMac if you don't want it.

Thanks for the offer, but I'm going to keep trying on breaks from school. I think my dad is now in the process of loading up its original OS (8.6) to play around with a bit.

8.6 was a bitchin OS. I still use it daily on my G3.

While I was gone my dad put Mac OS 9.1 on the iMac. It flies! The operating system takes only 40MB of RAM! Man, for the good old days. Unfortunately, decent web browsers for the old Mac OS don't exist. I have an ancient release of the Mozilla suite and it crawls. On top of that, there's no decent productivity software from the modern age. I want to bring this thing up to date.

Anyways, I've found a thread describing how to get xorg working in Debian on these old G3s, so in the coming days I'll probably be putting Lenny on here, with either XFCE or LXDE (I'll show the family the two options and let them pick). My only concern is that now it will be slower than with Mac OS. I don't think even Debian will take up as little as 40MB of RAM. But at least it will be up-to-date software.

It works now! I ended up going for the CD with Lenny and XFCE/LXDE. I was planning on using LXDE because it's fast and the PCMan file browser is amazing, but for some reason the installer didn't give me an option and just used XFCE. Whatever, it's still fast, and now it has a bit more eyecandy and configurability. This iMac is in the same room as my mom's desktop computer (a G5 iMac that is slowing with software bloat) and my dad is also likely to want to play around with it a bit, so now it's time to move my family towards open-source.

Congrats.

Just dont let dad install over it! Maybe image the drive?

If it does get deleted, I'll just reinstall but do so with a little less extraneous bloat (I had not intended to install XFCE). I'll save a copy of my xorg.conf, since that was the only thing that gave me trouble. Besides, all he had on OS9 were two or three games that he didn't really play. Plus, in OS9 you couldn't keep the machine booted up long- leave the room and it would die. I thought it was a problem with a loose power supply, but it hasn't had those problems yet with Debian, so it must just have been that OS9 would crash when allowed to sit idle.

I'm using Debian now on the iMac to make this post. With XFCE, it's not blazing fast but still quite usable (a bit slower than OS X on my laptop, but faster than Kubuntu or OpenSUSE on the MacBook) and with LXDE it is about as good as Ubuntu+GNOME. And I've installed most of the stuff I use (Pidgin, IceWeasel, IceDove, OOo, TeXmaker, eboard) so there's really nothing I do on my new 4GB, 2.2GHz laptop that I can't do just as well on this decade-old 320MB, 400MHz machine. Now that I have it working, I might end up making this my main machine and just use the laptop when I need something mobile. The family seems afraid to touch it because obviously using the graphical environment to surf the web would require 1337 Linux haxor skillz, so it's not going to get any more use than it did in the basement.

Oh... and it's faster than my mom's 64-bit G5 iMac that's sitting next to it, running an old version of OS X.