[SOLVED] Beige G3 Tower (oldworld) Massive Fail

**themacmeister** · October 17th, 2009

Where, oh where did you get Xubuntu Jaunty? I was using something way older than that... 7.04 or something shocking. 9.04 should not even be available?!?!

Luckily, I didn't have a drive bigger than 120GB. Believe it or not, you should have been able to format it from a WinBlows system using diskpart (with the extension id=af)

Anyways, glad to know you are up and running. That extra step about booting into OS9 and restoring the drivers is a MUST DO!

Hell, 120GB is enough for just about anything, and old IDE drives are cheap as chips now!

Best of luck with your install - I have dumped both my G3 and my iMac, and I am now experimenting with OSX86 on my AMD box. All is working except restart, and sleep when a USB printer is connected.

I think my next purchase will be a Mac Mini for the parents, as the WinXP box just confuses them! It is possible to install OSX86 onto this box, but very hard to get 8400GS video working right. I might give it another try shortly - before forking out AUS$1000+ for a Mini.

**eldon.t** · October 17th, 2009

@Mocker

yeah you have to consider limitations of this old generation softwares.
As soon as you see that some of your new hardware is not natively supported by your software (bios or system) you should consider changing hardware.

I didn't run into such problems as i simply put an old xbox 10GB hard drive in that g3, replacing the ultra "noisy" scsi original hd.

My final g3 linux setup runs fine, i decided to stick to lxde, substituted pcmanfm which doesn't have a trash (!), with thunar and removed the login manager, making it autologin to a single user.

Surprisingly today's huge applications do run, such as firefox 3.0 or openoffice, although they do take 30 sec to open..
I also managed to get the sound/mp3 working, internal speaker works too

Looks like it's not really capable of playing any kind of recent divx/xvid videos and most media player will crash, tried vlc or mplayer, i put that on the old ppc arch maybe not fully compatible with nowdays compilers those ppc packages are based on.. I didn't try to build them myself.

The one thing that is missing pretty badly is any kind of decent macromedia flash support, although you probably couldn't play a youtube video even SD, it can be quite useful in some cases for streaming audio and websites menus.

Anyways it was more than enough in my case to get a mail client running and access critical web pages. So, thank you linux powerpc

**themacmeister** · October 20th, 2009

Great to hear,

The slower G3 isn't a patch on the G4. If I had a mirror face G4 tower, with a 1.2GHz cpu - that equates to roughly a 2GHz CoreDuo. You can do everything with those, and newer PPC distros will work on them OOTB!

I have had to dump OSX86 in favour of Mint Linux, as I am doing some coding (hopefully) for an Open Source project. Will take a while

Cheers.

**allinfo** · July 13th, 2010

I am trying to do the same thing with Power Mac 9500 (Os 9.1) but I have no disks for the operating system. So got nowhere yet. Maybe a way around it?