Ok, many people have visited my site in the past several months searching for info on Lombard support in Tiger. This is because I posted earlier about my running the WWDC version of Tiger successfully on my PowerBook G3 Lombard. Until now, the Lombard has been supported by each release of Mac OS X. In fact, the performance seemed to improve over each release. Naturally, Lombard users want to take advantage of the new features found in Tiger. Unfortunately, I am sad to report that the installer would not allow me to install on my Lombard, explaining that it was not a supported machine.

I cannot explain specifically why Apple chose to cut out the Lombard in Tiger. I doubt that Firewire hardware itself is technically necessary to run Tiger. Many Lombard users may not have the DVD drive, or have the 333Mhz version which is arguably long in tooth now, but many of us are still using quite solid 400Mhz machines (or 466Mhz in my case). Again, I cannot say exactly why Tiger does not officially support the Lombard, but perhaps it is best. Ever since installing Gentoo PPC on my Lombard, I have thoroughly enjoyed the performance boost. Panther is of course still a very fine OS, as well. I expect it will be well supported for some time to come.

In the meantime, someone may find a way to trick the installer into installing on the Lombard. (Someone always does) And when they do, I will be interested in reading about it.

I do hope this helps the Lombard users out there who had been wondering about this.