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OSX 10.0 has got to be the least supported OS ever.

Opera, firefox, NETSCAPE, iCab, even apples own Safari, none of those are available for 10.0. And ie 5.1.2 preview edition cant do anything other than have render issues and completely crash.

I want to set up our old G4 for my mom. But 10.0 is unusuable. Classic mac os is an option, but she bought a book for learning osx. Leopard, if I wanted to spend money, is the only thing apple is selling. But, it is only on DVD and won't install for less than 867 MHz.

I am utterly amazed by Apples complete and unmitigated abandonment of our G4 tower. For goodness sakes, you could buy a windows 3.1 license up until last year.

So yeah, did anyone update to tiger via cd and then upgrade again, leaving that tiger license unusued?

I got a 10.5 disk you could borrow if you want.

You aren't supposed to upgrade OSes, you supposed to go out and buy something new and shiny with the Apple logo on it. Duh.

Apple doesn't have an equivalent to WGA, so torrent away.

Thanks. Maybe. I'd need to get a DVD drive working in the mac and then do the hack to make the OS instealler ignore the speed check.

The rarity of cd installs is what pushes the price up to the 250 range. I'm hoping for 10.4 as that is what the airport software wants.

BTW, ubuntu 6.06 PPC edition won't boot. I was rather surprised, as that would be the one distro of linux where you have a reasonable certainty about the hardware you will find.

Thanks. maybe.

A pirated OS disk seems like the perfect place to hide a rootkit. But, I dunno. Maybe.

What worthwhile software could you install on either of these? O.o

I installed Gentoo on a G4 at school. It was very unstable. In those days I think people mostly used Yellow Dog Linux on G4s so you could try that.

Good luck finding an OS with better support for it! You might try OS 9 too, if you can find the media. That would probably run a lot better although browser support might be horrible.

If you want to go down the Ubuntu route, I installed and used Ubuntu 8.04 on my work laptop last summer (Powerbook G4, I think like 1.0Ghz). Worked mostly fine, never managed to get flash to work (there's a way to get x86 flash working via an emulator, don't think it worked well in any case), cpu scaling didn't work, and I did have a bit of trouble getting dual monitors to work.

Also, have you tried emailing Apple about this? They might let you buy a 10.4 CD anyway.

Got ubuntu to work by putting it on the master hard drive instead of a slave. I don't actually know that that fixed it, but that's what I did for try 2. I upgraded it to the long term support release, but I still wasnt able to change resolutions. After messing around with that for so long, I didnt even try printer drivers or stuff. As nuke suggested, I just torrented 10.4. I then had to get a hold of another mac for 10 minutes to burn the first cd, as one of the limitations of 10.0 is no cd burning. Its all working now though.

Rawr. Stay away from macs.

bad advice..

Hey guys, the initial price difference for macs is worth it because they'll totally still be completely useful in like ten years. You need to think of the long term investment.

It depends which mac you are looking at. The 13" macbook pro (the ~$1100 laptop) is actually fairly competitive and well built compared to other machines. I consider the more expensive laptops and the imac to be overpriced though.

That said, I have had my eye on a shiny new macbook pro for a long time.

But you can but a 15.6 inch laptop for 300 at Walmart. I even saw it in stock.

The premium price of their computers is worth it to be able to legitimately use OS X. They've been consistently making it better, and the API and developer tools are great. Applications look nice and behave cohesively because Apple sets high standards of design and behavior and makes it easy to meet them.

Their frequent backward-incompatible upgrades are annoying, but don't matter much for open source software which is written by people who are compassionate enough to not use the newer libraries. But that doesn't extend to 10.0, 10.1 and 10.2 which, as far as I could tell, were meant to bootstrap a development community for OS X, not please end-users.

I searched for "power mac g4 os x" when I read the original post and immediately found a page that seemed to describe how to install versions 10.2-10.5, which is why I really couldn't understand your fixation with 10.0.

I found a computer in the hallway, a Pentium III (so probably not even 10 years old), and adopted it for a few weeks. Can you guess how useful it was? Neither Arch nor Knoppix would boot, though Plan 9 worked great. What a red herring.

Both my laptop and web server are both Pentium III based, running Ubuntu 9.04 and working fine. They are both 2001/2002 models, so they are pretty damn close to a decade old (last new PIII model was released in 2002). Laptop is showing its age, but it's been dropped enough times that I can forgive it. They are both running the same software that my nice quad core desktop uses. Hell, I could pick up Windows XP licenses for cheap and install that as well if I wanted to. Neither will ever be able to run Vista or later, but it will be a long time I think before Ubuntu releases become unusable on them.

The additional price for Macs used to be justified since the hardware would work well for longer than an equivalent PC. The quality and reliability of Apple hardware ain't exactly what it used to be, and the Apple doesn't seem to be placing a huge emphasis on backwards compatibility. To be fair, some of this comes from the fact that software is progressing at a much faster rate than it used to. Apple has never really providing OS upgrades to older products, for example OS 9.1 was released in 2001, which was the last OS released for many sold as late as 1998.

These days, the price is more justifiable for the OS and in certain cases the hardware design (PowerBook keyboards are awesome, but I don't think there's anything spectacular about Mac desktop's hardware). Big change, and potentially a shocker for someone who is indifferent to the OS (see: a great majority of users).



He's noting that Apple doesn't manufacture 10.4 discs anymore, compared to Microsoft who still until recently sold Windows 3.1. 3.11, for the record, had a weird popularity in the embedded field that defies pretty much all reason.

Yay, we've almost completed the collection: every combination of [works/doesn't work] and [Old Mac/Old non-Mac] accounted for except [doesn't work/old Mac]. Got any more stories to make this thread complete?


Well that's obscene.

Last summer, the company I worked for was giving away various older hardware in preparation for moving offices. One was a powerbook g4 with a busted screen. Does that count?

The fixation with 10.0 was that that was what the mac came with and what I had to work with. That mac was darn expensive back in the day, and to leave the OS unusable (by not releasing safari) offering no OS upgrades, or software support is upsetting considering the investment made into the machine. It was also a shock. It never occured to me that any company would ever do that to its customers. The microcenter salesman sure didnt tell us that the new OSX wasnt really for us, the purchasers, but rather for developers.

I would think it fair to pay 120 for a 10.4 install set (10.5 is 120 at BB) if I could buy it direct from apple or somehow know it wasnt simply burned and labelled and had the same chance of containing a root kit that a random torrent has. To bad its $250 with no box and no manual.

http://hardcoremac.stores.yahoo.net/macosx10tion.html

And the 'mac experience' that they sell does not call for buying firewire DVD drives or hacking 10.5 command lines to get around speed checks.

This is also interesting

http://www.techspot.com/news/35164-wind ... ed-pc.html


Usable? Probably not. But no hacking required to install whatever OS you choose that can run on your machine.

I would have thought starting with whatever version of OS X was already on the computer and upgrading to a more recent version would be easier, but I guess it's not. sux.