However, I've always been able to appreciate the contributions made by Apple to UI's and their elegant designs. Paying thousands of dollars for hardware that all too quickly becomes obsolete as soon as newer OS versions emerge never appealed to me. As an increasingly older school computer guy I can say that I've never really bought into the Mac Craze and their inherent elitism just turns me off. I really do enjoy these little "Back to the Future" articles that pop up on Ars every now and then. I wonder how Classic done with a 68k emulator and a PowerPC emulator running directly on the x86 CPU (not 68k emulator running on the PowerPC emulator) would be like. That being said, it's IDE so any SSD would have to have a conversion from SATA to IDE probably. I suppose if you had a small cheap SSD and put swap on the SSD you'd have some sort of "poor mans" memory that would significantly help things along. It's freaking HARD to get ANYthing running on it, BUT if Windows XP can run on it why not Linux? sure 256MB is tough but maybe. In my original post I mentioned doing it without having to re-compile.Ī more involved test would be the "pull out all the stops" idea of getting a usable version of Linux by "any means possible" including gentoo and re-compiling/optimizing everything (which would probably mean compiling for 2 weeks!).Ī particularly vexing situation I've seen is the old celeron e-machine my wife's parents have sitting idle because it can't upgrade from WinXP. Since we are just talking about web browsing and email, one of the BSD's would probably work better. But if it runs the programs you need it to run, it's better than a lot of alternatives. Sheepshaver is a cool thing when it works, but it barfs on a lot of things, and its integration leaves a lot to be desired. Besides the fact that Intel Tiger will in fact prevent you from starting Classic, Classic actually runs most of the app's code natively on the CPU, and Rosetta does not run at a level low enough to intercept and translate it (it's a userland QuickTransit, with all the limitations that entails, while Classic has low-level "magic" in the OS to enable it to function). I have a 10.4 install DVD but it won't boot due to EFI problems.I might fiddle with UNetbootin to override. There aren't many seeders, it looks like this will take about 10 hours. It is not hard to find a bootable MacOS X 1.4.8 Tiger VMware image, I'm downloading it right now. I am going to prove whether or not you can run Classic PPC apps in a VM. Unlike almost everyone on the internet, I know when it is time to put up or shut up. I have Sheepshaver running on my Mac mini, it runs but it is basically useless since it won't run graphic-intensive games like Carmageddon. I stuck with PPC for ages, my last PPC was a PowerMac G5 Quad 2.5Ghz and my first Intel Mac was my current Mac mini mid-2011. I run it headless, I can run it remotely with screen sharing from Back To My Mac. So it's been a long time since I ran Classic, even though I have a PowerMac G4 dual 1Ghz MDD "Wind Tunnel" sitting right next to me with 10.4 installed. My first distro was MKLinux DR3 on a Beige G3 (233 MHz)įollowed by LinuxPPC 1999 and then Yellow Dog Linux 2.0 and finally Fedora. Linux worked very well on Apple PowerPC hardware but I don't know that any mainstream distributions still maintain 32 bit PPC builds. How easy would it be to make a chromecast bullet proof system on a really old PC or Mac? I know there is "cloudready" and ars wrote about that, but what about a REALLY old system? Being able to load some version of Linux that will get updates (security and otherwise) and continue to work for a while (say 5+ years?) reasonably is a pretty good thing when all they really are interested in is mail and browsing. It's not unusual for the Grandparents to have a computer for a LONG time. I know Linux works well on older hardware, but I've not REALLY tried to to do the "old computer" Linux thing in a while. Is it possible to take an old G3 that will not work with OS9, load it up with a distro that it works with and be able to work reasonably (say, without having to re-compile everything?) I think more interesting would be to see how useful Linux can be on older systems like that G3.
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