Macintosh
My love for Apple
I’ve always been a big Apple fan. In fact, my interest in computers goes back to the Apple II’s I played with in school. In 4th grade, my elementary school built a very nice lab of Apple IIgs machines. I spent every spare minute of free time during the day down at the lab, trying to learn more about them. We got a few Mac LC II’s later. Then I moved away from that school and found out that PCs were popular. Like most people I guess, I’ve been a PC person ever since. I’ve always held a love for Apple’s computers, however, and in recent years have been able to pick up old macs people were throwing out.
My current collection consists of two Macintosh Classics, a Centris 650 (Ok, I gave that to my brother), a IIsi, and a 1.33Ghz 17″ PowerBook G4. I have also owned a PowerComputing PowerWave 604/132, a PowerBook G3 Lombard, and a 12″ iBook G3 800 (32MB VRAM) which now belongs to my wife. Some older machines I have owned: a IIgs (With all the fixin’s — SCSI HD, Memory Card, ROM 3), an LC 630 DOS Compatible, a PowerMac 6500 and a PowerBook Duo 2300c. So, I’m always looking for good old/new Apple hardware. If you have any items you’re getting rid of, please let me know. I’m looking for anything from vintage Apple to the latest and greatest. :)
My 17″ PowerBook G4
As I recently began working on my Master’s Degree, my wife and I decided it might be a good opportunity to purchase a new computer. We had wanted a new Mac with a superdrive so we could create home DVDs at some point in the future. Ultimately we decided to get a new PowerBook for myself and Jolene would inherit my iBook. I did some testing of the 15″ and 17″ PowerBook’s at my local Mac dealer. The 17″ just felt a lot better to me. Now that I have it, I believe I made the right decision. It is truly amazing. I look forward to using for a long time to come.
My wife’s iBook
My wife has recently inherited my iBook 800 I purchased with money received for my December 2002 graduation from college. (Thank you very much to everyone you contributed!) Using my PowerWave as my main machine (see below) for so long, I was very excited to have this brand-new machine. It is the first Apple machine I have purchased new. My wife is very glad to be using it now because she had been using a PowerBook G3 Lombard for a while now and was beginning to outgrow it. The thing that decided it was that her PowerBook finally died.
Mac OS X on a PowerComputing PowerWave 604/132 (G3/400)
The full story:
When I first got this machine, I spent several weeks hard at work with it. I learned a lot about Mac hardware and software that I had never known before. I knew a good deal about older macs, but the newer PPC macs were a bit new to me. Basically, as soon as I got this new/old Mac clone, I wanted to try to put Mac OS X on it. And I did it! It took a bit of work, but it was very worth it.
I upgraded the CPU to a 225Mhz 604e from a PowerTower Pro 225. At first, this caused a lot of instability, but then I added the L2 cache module from the PowerTower Pro and it worked like a charm after that. Still, in order to get OS X installed, I needed to replace the non-Apple CD-ROM drive with an Apple branded CD drive. I still had problems after replacing the CD-ROM drive, and I realized it was because I had used pdisk to partition my drive since using Drive Setup to begin with. I went back and redid my OS 9 install from scratch, using Drive Setup to repartition my two drives. That did the trick! Using XPostFacto 2.2b7, I started the installation. After the installation, I had to force it to boot back into OS 9 to run XpostFacto again, telling it to reboot to the OS X installation.
I first authored this page from the “Terminal” of my Mac OS X machine. I was really quite impressed with the performance of this machine at the time. Mac OS X (10.1.4) ran quite well with only 240Megs of RAM and a 225Mhz 604e. (I’ve now upgraded it to 256Megs of RAM and it runs better) My whole attempt to get OS X / Darwin installed took about two weeks, but most of that was waiting for Mac OS 9. I could not have done this without XPostFacto, of course, and I would like to thank Ryan Rempel and Other World Computing for providing a wonderful piece of software for those of us unfortunate enough not to own the latest and greatest Mac technology. Anyway, I’m very excited to now have a Mac OS X installation, and being a Unix geek (and what’s more, a BSD enthusiast), I’m thoroughly enjoying my “Switch”.
I now have XDarwin running so I can use the Gimp and other great X apps. Also, I now use my FreeBSD machine to run all my X apps remotely. I created an elegant setup where I set up RSA public key (passwordless) ssh login to my FreeBSD box from my mac and kick off a script to run xfce on my Mac’s remote display. The ssh command kicks off within my .xinitrc file on my Mac. Pretty snazzy, eh?
I am also now running Jaguar (10.2.1) on this machine! I had to upgrade to a G3 in order to accomplish this, as XPostFacto is yet to make this work with the 603 or 604s. I am very happy with my performance and I’m now even beginning to do some application development on the box.
When running some benchmarks on my machine, my new G3/400 runs even with the standard Apple G3/400 machines. However, when factoring in graphics and disk performance, my machine runs even with an Apple G3/300. (Xbench results below) Really, my biggest bottleneck is my hard drives which I would like to upgrade someday if I don’t first buy a new machine.
In summary:
CPU upgrade improves performance but not entirely necessary. Since my installation, I replaced the 225Mhz CPU with the original 132Mhz CPU. OS X boots and runs just fine, albeit a bit more slowly.
CD-ROM upgrade necessary. OS X requires Apple branded CD-ROM drive. (At least the installation does)
XPostFacto is of course necessary. This utility supplies the Mac OS X kernel with necessary modules to support the 604e and legacy hardware.
You must start with Mac OS 9. XPostFacto does not yet work with Mac OS 8.6.
A G3 or G4 upgrade card is required to use Jaguar (as of 10/13/2002)
Be prepared for little complications. Apple seems to have decided to make it quite difficult to keep pre-G3 Mac owners from running OS X on their barely capable hardware. I think this is probably for good reason, but I’m still happy with my setup and encourage anyone willing to do the same thing.
Screenshots
:
Here is a screenshot of my PowerWave running OS X (10.1.4):
Here is the latest screenshot of my box running Jaguar! (10.2.1):
Benchmarks - Xbench 1.0b2
:
Results 23.04
System Info
Xbench Version 1.0b2
System Version 10.2.2
Physical RAM 256 MB
Processor PowerPC,60?@0 [400 MHz]
CPU Test 44.22
GCD Recursion 28.92 1.13 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 50.74 43.90 Mflop/sec
Floating Point Library 53.01 2.38 Mops/sec
Thread Test 24.50
Computation 22.24 179.15 Kops/sec, 4 threads
Memory Contention 16.88 53.40 MB/sec, 2 threads
Lock Contention 34.38 431.56 Klocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 20.57
System 16.62
Allocate 32.35 17.02 Kalloc/sec
Fill 10.63 60.98 MB/sec
Copy 6.86 41.18 MB/sec
Stream 24.52
Copy 23.43 93.72 MB/sec
Scale 23.47 93.87 MB/sec
Add 25.60 102.41 MB/sec
Triad 25.58 102.33 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test 16.54
Line 17.95 456.89 lines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 16.46 1.16 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 19.16 441.58 circles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 16.73 181.77 beziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 12.39 208.65 chars/sec
User Interface Test 16.33
Elements 16.33 5.23 refresh/sec
Disk Test 16.06
Sequential 13.41
Uncached Sequential Write 15.76 6.98 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Sequential Read 11.06 4.78 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 18.71
Uncached Random Write 17.46 4.10 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Random Read 19.96 4.01 MB/sec [256K blocks]
