I know I am ignorant and stupid when it comes to hardware and
software. That's why I told a friend of mine who was pining for a cheap
Mac to run OS X on (he's a true Unix fanatic and thought this
would be so much cheaper than a Sun Workstation and more exciting than
some beige Linux box) to buy any old PCI Power Mac he could get his
hands on - and I would help him install OS X.
Obviously a big mistake, as there are multiple obstacles to master
before you can start typing away in Terminal. Nevertheless, a couple of
weeks later he came up with a 7600 (120 MHz, 192 MB RAM, 1 GB
hard drive, a Low End Mac "good buy")
which we cleaned up, made a low-level format and installed OS 9
on.
No problems there; the machine performed nicely, and my friend
(let's call him Mike) even had fun playing Myth on it (but with
the help of the walkthrough, the old cheater). So far, so good. You
could use this machine for a gazillion different things (even install
Net BSD on it), but as 120 MHz is hardly enough to run OS X, he
made another excursion to
eBay, and a couple of days later he was a proud owner of a 500 MHz
Metabox G3 card - without the software.
No problem, I thought. A quick check on their website should do the
trick, but alas, as they stopped supporting Mac upgrades. There was no
software to download.
Apparently Sonnet drivers would do the trick, but Sonnet
unfortunately wanted US$29 for the download. Thankfully, one of the
members of the Mac UK email list came
to the rescue and sent the driver and documentation. After installing
these goodies, the 7600 started to perform quite handsomely, and we
were ready for the next step: OS X!
We hooked up an old 4 GB SCSI hard drive to the machine (frightfully
easy, thanks to the 7600's easy-open technology) and did a low-level
format on this grandmother of a hard drive, which noisily cleaned the
data-debris of her tracks. Next came the question - how do we actually
install OS X on such a machine? OS X supports neither pre-G3
Power Macs nor G3 Cards.
A quick check on Google and the
OS X email list revealed the incredibly helpful existence of
XPostFacto, a patch that will con the OS X installer into
believing that there's already some sort of installation present by
putting some kernel extensions on the drive, which will result in a
flawless installation.
That's what we thought. Due to the extreme slowness of the old hard
drive, the installation took about 3 hours for 10.0.3 and
another 3 hours for 10.1. As I had to leave earlier than
planned, we had to abort the upgrade mid-cycle, which left us with a
non-booting Mac and another format/installation run. That took another
day, thanks to the "three legged donkey," as the old SCSI drive was now
called.
After the sheer endless wait, OS X 10.1 finally booted, and, much to
my surprise, performed quite well. Okay, it wasn't flying, but the
quartz engine didn't have any problems with dragging or dropping,
Microsoft Internet Explorer worked fine (and is going to be replaced by
iCab ASAP), and everything looked
pretty much hunky-dory - except for an annoying bug that freezes the
computer every time we try to reactivate a background task that was
lying in the dock and OS X tries to perform it's childish "genie
out of the bottle" trick.
We still have to update the machine to 10.1.2, but for now Mike is
happy to play with "Terminal" (he really doesn't need all the fancy
graphics) and all sorts of funny command-line thingies. End cost: $120
for the 7600, $200 for the used G3 card, and the monitor and extra hard
drive came free.
That's $330 for a machine that maybe doesn't outperform a MP G4, but
which still can be used for network apps, word processing, Web serving,
and even plays MP3s while doing it. And it uses the world's most
advanced OS.
Is it worth it? Well, I have to admit that installation was
(although rather slow) quite fun, and being able to ignore Apple's
restrictive "No-can-do-with-old-beige-Macs" policy certainly feels
good. Mike is happy as can be, as he has a new cheap toy to play with
that looks positively stunning and can do everything an old Sun
workstation can (and more).
Lessons learned? Definitely go for a fast hard drive when installing
OS X on a system with low RAM.
Punchline? None today, sorry.
Signing out.... 
