Just wanted to share my recent experience with an acquaintance's laptop. After struggling in my free time for nearly a month, I've finally got a Macintosh PowerBook G3 "Wallstreet" circa 1997-1998 running Ubuntu Linux 4.10 PPC. What a nightmare that was. Older Macs, dubbed "OldWorld", are indeed a bleeding nightmare to install anything but Mac OS on. But, now that all's said and done, it can finally be useful in a practical way. This thing is equivalent in x86 CPU power to about a Pentium Pro, and the latest Mac OS it supports is 9.2... pitiful. But now it's got a full & modern secure OS, OpenOffice.org 2.0, Opera 8.51, Firefox 1.5, games, multimedia software, and much more. I've found that it runs Firefox a little sluggishly, and although Opera starts up more slowly, it is much more snappy and usable once it's up. If anybody can get an old throwaway Mac or PC laptop which won't run XP or OS X respectively, it might still make a decent workstation if you add a little Linux. After all, cheap or free hardware + free, stable & secure OS = good value. Attached is a screenshot of this running the lightweight Xfce 4.2 window manager.
Yeah, thanks man. The toughest part wasn't installing Linux (actually that was the easy part). It was contending with Apple's defective implementation of OpenFirmware found in most Macs of that era. It only wants to boot Mac OS! So, I had to install a minimal installation of OS 8.2 and use a bootloader program called BootX (v1.13). Now it works perfectly, although the Mac installation is basically worthless. I honestly don't see the appeal of Mac OS.
Well, I think it's the best OS available right now, bar none. However, the simple fact of the matter is that Windows wouldn't run on a PPC even if I wanted to, so my choices were basically Mac OS 7-9, BSD, or Linux. Mac OS is, IMHO, utter shite. BSD has its merits but I find it a bit cumbersome on the desktop. Linux is free and it is portable and scalable enough to run quite well even on this old 266MHz G3, so it was the obvious choice for this laptop. If this thread looks like Linux propaganda, it's not. I'm just happy to turn this laptop into something useful, as I was about to give up on it. It came with OS 8.2, which is basically worthless, and now it can do nearly everything you would want a modern PC to do, despite being about 9 years old.
You have definately giving the laptop a new lease of life, that's for sure. [ot] I'm pretty sure Windows NT 4 comes in a PPC version, does it not? [/ot]
Yeah, and I was about to suggest that the guy just trash it or sell it on eBay. [ot]No build for PPC, though NT4 did have a build for Alpha. It actually ran quite fast on Alpha, but there was almost no driver or application support, so it's really only an oddity. Besides, NT4 hasn't been supported in years, and most software won't run on it. Not to mention that even now an NT4 license would cost more than the whole laptop did! Linux is free, has tons of software, and much better security than Windows.[/ot]
Good job done! And thanks for the valuable info! Nothing more satisfying than getting an old piece of equipment to work again…. And the older it is, the more satisfaction….. That’s what the wife says every time she gets me to do something…. [ot]This is freaky as I am about to embark on a similar task and this is really giving me hope. A friend has completely :swear: up their Mac (the one which had the all in one built machine, the original iMac) and I volunteered to have a look. It is possible that it is just hardware problem but I know for a fact that two OS have been installed, the 9 and 10 and before the machine “died” it had a lot of problems with which OS was loading at boot. So there is a bit of work to be done.... [/ot]
You and me both. My wife that is... *runs away* Hang in there, it's possible. I recently worked on one of the early blue iMacs, and it was actually running OS X ... if you want to call it 'running' -- it was more like 'crawling'. At the request of the owner, I installed Linux on it which worked without a hitch. Since it was one of the first "New World" Macs, the OpenFirmware didn't hinder the installation of Linux in the slightest. Didn't need a multiboot with BootX or any of that jazz, just installed right from the disc. Runs Linux roughly 4x faster than it ran OS X, and about 1.5x as fast as it ran OS 9.2. I dunno if your friend is interested in going that route, but Ubuntu works quite well on Macs -- even old ones!
Excellent, everything "just worked"... video, audio, chipset, ACPI, PCMCIA, network, modem, the works. Even the laptop's lid switch works so it goes into hybernation when you shut it. The lid switch did take a little bit of tweaking since the kernel is actually running from the HFS partition and not the Linux partition, but now it works fine. If you can look closely in the screenshot I posted, you can see the little music icon in the upper-right for Rhytmbox. It's actually playing some MP3s off of my fileserver. Thanks man, I didn't think I would be able to do it. Almost everybody I talked to said to just give up on that era of laptop that it was too hard, but now that I know how I think I could do it relatively quickly & easily. Although, unless the system is mine, next time I'm charging a premium!
I'm not too keen on MacOS myself. Although ironically, the Macintosh was the first computer I ever used, and grew up with. I used to be pretty good at using OS 7.0 up to 8.5. I've never used OSX though, but it doesn't really appeal anyway. What kind of spec would you need to run Linux? Surely you would need to disable most/all of the graphical enhancements in order for it to run smoothly on an old iMac?
Linux will run on anything from a 386 to a supercomputer. However, you must make some consessions on a CPU as low-end as a 386. The laptop I installed it on was a 266MHz G3 PowerBook codename 'Wallstreet' with 192mb RAM (max for that model). It runs a heavy desktop like Gnome or KDE just fine, although the slow CPU speed and relatively low RAM lends itself much better to a lighter desktop like Xfce. (Yes, you have your choice of multiple desktops in Linux ) That being said, running Xfce it is probably as responsive as a 1GHz PC running Windows XP. I didn't have to disable any effects or anything, it's a pretty vanilla Xfce desktop. In fact I even added some things like the taskbar (top) and desktop pager (4 boxes, bottom-center) which are optional companion packages for Xfce.
I think the lowest-end system I've run Linux on was a Pentium1 ~99MHz, and the highest-end was a 16-CPU mainframe. I've never run Linux on a 386, but you could do it -- even surf the Internet securely using lynx, get your mail with pine, chat on IRC, lotsa stuff actually. It would resemble an old style Unix terminal more than modern Linux system, but what do you expect from a 386? They're not clocked much higher than an NES!
You must have a big lounge Seriously though, where did you get to try Linux on that motha! What distro were you using and how did it perform?
It was a terminal server for a large organization's billing dept, not one of my personal machines (unfortunately). It was running some older Red Hat derivative I believe, and it ran quite well. It replaced several AS400's, which are expensive and difficult to administrate.
How does Xfce compare to GNOME and KDE? Would you suggest Xfce for a Pentium 2 (~233-450Mhz) 128MB RAM laptop?
