==========================================[ JonSharp.net:70:mac ]====
Mac -= archive content: ca. 2002 =-
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My love for Apple
I've always been a big Apple fan. In fact, my interest in computers
goes back to the Apple II's I played with in school. In 4th grade,
my elementary school built a very nice lab of Apple IIgs machines.
I spent every spare minute of free time during the day down at the
lab, trying to learn more about them. We got a few Mac LC II's later.
Then I moved away from that school and found out that PCs were
popular. Like most people I guess, I've been a PC person ever since.
I've always held a love for Apple's computers, however, and in
recent years have been able to pick up old macs people were throwing
out.
My current collection consists of two Macintosh Classics, a Centris
650 (Ok, I gave that to my brother), a IIsi, and a PowerComputing
PowerWave 604/132 (My main machine now). I have also owned a IIgs
(With all the fixin's -- SCSI HD, Memory Card, ROM 3), an LC 630
DOS Compatible, a PowerMac 6500 and a PowerBook Duo 2300c. So, I'm
always looking for good old/new Apple hardware. If you have any
items you're getting rid of, please let me know. I'm looking for
anything from vintage Apple to the latest and greatest. :)
Mac OS X on a PowerComputing PowerWave 604/132 (G3/400)
The full story:
When I first got this machine, I spent several weeks hard at work
with it. I learned a lot about Mac hardware and software that I had
never known before. I knew a good deal about older macs, but the
newer PPC macs were a bit new to me. Basically, as soon as I got this
new/old Mac clone, I wanted to try to put Mac OS X on it. And I did
it! It took a bit of work, but it was very worth it.
I upgraded the CPU to a 225Mhz 604e from a PowerTower Pro 225. At
first, this caused a lot of instability, but then I added the L2
cache module from the PowerTower Pro and it worked like a charm after
that. Still, in order to get OS X installed, I needed to replace the
non-Apple CD-ROM drive with an Apple branded CD drive. I still had
problems after replacing the CD-ROM drive, and I realized it was
because I had used pdisk to partition my drive since using Drive
Setup to begin with. I went back and redid my OS 9 install from
scratch, using Drive Setup to repartition my two drives. That did the
trick! Using XPostFacto 2.2b7, I started the installation. After the
installation, I had to force it to boot back into OS 9 to run
XpostFacto again, telling it to reboot to the OS X installation.
I first authored this page from the "Terminal" of my Mac OS X machine.
I was really quite impressed with the performance of this machine at
the time. Mac OS X (10.1.4) ran quite well with only 240Megs of RAM
and a 225Mhz 604e. (I've now upgraded it to 256Megs of RAM and it runs
better) My whole attempt to get OS X / Darwin installed took about two
weeks, but most of that was waiting for Mac OS 9. I could not have
done this without XPostFacto, of course, and I would like to thank
Ryan Rempel and Other World Computing for providing a wonderful piece
of software for those of us unfortunate enough not to own the latest
and greatest Mac technology. Anyway, I'm very excited to now have a
Mac OS X installation, and being a Unix geek (and what's more, a BSD
enthusiast), I'm thoroughly enjoying my "Switch".
I now have XDarwin running so I can use the Gimp and other great X
apps. Also, I now use my FreeBSD machine to run all my X apps
remotely. I created an elegant setup where I set up RSA public key
(passwordless) ssh login to my FreeBSD box from my mac and kick off
a script to run xfce on my Mac's remote display. The ssh command
kicks off within my .xinitrc file on my Mac. Pretty snazzy, eh?
I am also now running Jaguar (10.2.1) on this machine! I had to
upgrade to a G3 in order to accomplish this, as XPostFacto is yet to
make this work with the 603 or 604s. I am very happy with my
performance and I'm now even beginning to do some application
development on the box.
When running some benchmarks on my machine, my new G3/400 runs even
with the standard Apple G3/400 machines. However, when factoring in
graphics and disk performance, my machine runs even with an Apple
G3/300. (Xbench results below) Really, my biggest bottleneck is my
hard drives which I would like to upgrade someday if I don't first
buy a new machine.
In summary:
CPU upgrade improves performance but not entirely necessary. Since my
installation, I replaced the 225Mhz CPU with the original 132Mhz CPU.
OS X boots and runs just fine, albeit a bit more slowly.
CD-ROM upgrade necessary. OS X requires Apple branded CD-ROM drive.
(At least the installation does)
XPostFacto is of course necessary. This utility supplies the Mac OS X
kernel with necessary modules to support the 604e and legacy hardware.
You must start with Mac OS 9. XPostFacto does not yet work with
Mac OS 8.6.
A G3 or G4 upgrade card is required to use Jaguar (as of 10/13/2002)
Be prepared for little complications. Apple seems to have decided to
make it quite difficult to keep pre-G3 Mac owners from running OS X
on their barely-capable hardware. I think this is probably for good
reason, but I'm still happy with my setup and encourage anyone
willing to do the same thing.
Screenshots: (thumbs only)
(IMG) Running OS X (10.1.4)
(IMG) Running Jaguar