Well installing OS 10.3 on my half-dead RevA iMac was someting of a breeze.
First, remember, I’d installed a bigger hard drive – I really don’t think that the 4 gig drive that shipped with the original iMac is going to be enough for running OS X and having much useful software, let alone any actual data. So Jon Ward very kindly gave me an old 20 gig iMac hard drive he had replaced for a bigger one for someone else. But hey, 20 gigs is five times bigger than what I had before, and twice what my 2001 iBook has. Even in OS 9 I noticed the machine ran faster and quieter (possibly because the disk was less fragmented).
Then I partitioned the new drive in OS 9. making sure that the 1st partition was smaller than 8 gigs – this is essential on early iMacs due to some weird limitation in the IDE interface.
I then checked my iMac’s firmware was up-to-date. This is essential – installing OS X on a machine with the wrong firmware can, I believe, be terminal. Firmware up-to-date, off we go, installing OS 10.3 on the small 8 gig partition.
And here I am, typing this in Safari running on a RevA 233 mHz iMac. OS X seems really quite snappy – I’ve not fired up any serious applications yet, but the Finder works better than it did in OS 10.0 on my 500mHz iBook. My cruddy old Elonex VGA monitor is happy with 800×600 at 60Hz – 800×600 is the lowest resultion you can practically use OS X at. Believe me. I’ve tried it at 640×480 and you can’t even see the bottom of many dialogue boxes in Sytem Preferences.
Using an old Apple microphone Vlod gave me years ago, I’ve even fired up Skype, with mixed results. Only spoken to our Estonian friend Echo123 so far, and it was very choppy. Perhaps 233mHz isn’t enough for Skype, and I know I won’t be doing any video editing on this machine. But here are some things I can do:
- develop and serve web pages using Apache
- run MacMAME games (I hope!)
- Henry can paint using TuxPaint
- If I install X11 I can run free software like Gimp
- Browse the web using Safari and Firefox
- Print on my Samsung laser printer
- Use my HP scanner – at last!
- Sync my phone and my Palm using iSync
- ooooh just oodles more stuff