Comments on: It Lives! Panther on the Beige G3!

By: Shad Smolensky

Shad Smolensky — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:35:32 +0000

Hi Andy: This is an interesting experiment, isn’t it? Initially it put my site traffic by a factor of 10 but this hs fallen away to the same old readership, possibly because I had wasted the time of SB and KA cyber stalkers. But I think there is less blog scanning going on in the summer too..

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By: Gary

Gary — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 03:37:46 +0000

I got Panther to install with XPost on a Beige with a G4 upgrade but could never get the cache to work. Nothing I tried (all available freeware cache controls) did the trick, and XPostfacto cache enable caused a kernal panic on boot everytime. I ended up erasing and reinstalling 10.2.8.

Which is a shame, because even with the cache disabled and no video card driver installed, the interface was clearly faster.

By: Gadgetgirl

Gadgetgirl — Mon, 26 Jan 2004 08:54:14 +0000

George Katele:
That is too bad that you sold your Beige G3. Most likely if you’d done an open firmware reset, it would have solved your problem.

In one of my attempts to install Panther on my Beige G3, I had a similar experience. I got to some point where the install wouldn’t complete and a reboot (even from the OS9 CD) would only give a system error bomb. The out was a reset. Several attempts got Panther running and I don’t regret a minute of it!

I would caution anyone who wants to attempt installing Panther on their Beige to be prepared for down time. If you can’t live with your G3 being down, don’t try it now. Sometimes the install goes without a hitch, in other cases (like mine) it took about two weeks, four formats of the HD and a lot of hair pulling before it came together.

Happy Macing!

By: sam

sam — Fri, 23 Jan 2004 01:14:23 +0000

Neil – I envy you! I’d love a new G5! Unfortunately, on my educator paycheck I can’t justify the cost yet…

However, this is what I was talking about when I mentioned this being a hobbyist computer. It seems you had uncommonly bad luck with your beige, but even so, the few times when I’ve had to curse and sweat over the beige have actually been kind of fun. I enjoy the troubleshooting and subsequent solution finding. Of course, I don’t have kids!

Enjoy your G5, lucky dog.

By: Neil

Neil — Fri, 23 Jan 2004 00:12:51 +0000

ps. of course, my ADB Wacom was *not* supported in OS X. . .

By: Neil

Neil — Fri, 23 Jan 2004 00:07:21 +0000

I ran 10.0 through 10.2.8 on my old Beige. (500MHz G4, 640 Meg RAM, ATI Orion video, Sonnet FireWire/USB card, external SCSI CDRW burner, Scanmaker X6 SCSI Scanner, external SCSI zip, ADB Wacom tablet, USB optical mouse, external Firewire DVD burner, 23″ Mitsubishi monitor. etc etc etc.)

Somewhere around 10.2.3, I started hitting nasty performance problems. But the endless upgrade treadmill marched on, and I did too, hoping the problems would be resolved. Then at 10.2.8, something went awry, and I would have problems, mostly not being able to find the boot device, hangs during OS X reinstalls, etc. I bought a new Logic Board, new ROM, nothing seemed to fix it. I elimintated RAM as a cause by swapping with other machines. I got it back up and running for a couple of months, then when I had dual-booted back to Classic, I couldn’t get it to find the OS X volume again – back to re-format, wrestle with install. XPost Facto didn’t even help. I eventually found that my PRAM battery was getting sucked dry. Over the space of a couple of weeks. This happened with both Logic Boards, and didn’t happen under Classic.

That’s when I bought my dual 2GHz G5. I hit my limit, and finally got sick of screwing around with it. I decided that I’d rather spend my evenings with my family, then cussing and sweating over the accursed box, waiting for it to reboot, etc.

$3000 well spent. Worth every penny. Just for the reliable sleep-mode alone. The Beige wouldn’t sleep, so I was constantly rebooting, and booting takes 2-5 minutes. And I couldn’t use iDVD. Bleh.
My teenage son is now using the Beige primarily as an Escape Velocity machine. (does all his other work on a school-provided Windows laptop)

By: John D. LaRue

John D. LaRue — Thu, 22 Jan 2004 21:15:46 +0000

Sam: My internal SCSI connector has nothing hooked to it… All my guts are ATA / IDE, even my zip drive… The only thing I used my SCSI for was my external storage harddrives and scanner (which I dearly miss), so as far as SCSI termination settings, there’s none… Now, is there some type of SCSI setting inside my desktop that I need to adjust or change, because when I do a system profile querry, SCSI doesn’t appear anywhere… Seems like systme 10.2.6 isn’t seeing the SCSI buss at all… Any suggestions or ideas ????

By: sam

sam — Thu, 22 Jan 2004 19:24:15 +0000

Bo – I see your point, perhaps ‘only for hobbyists’ is a bit too strong of a term, perhaps more accurately, ‘only for people who are willing to do some tinkering once in a while, and accept that upgrading isn’t always going to be as plug and play as it is on newer hardware. Anytime you start running software on unsupported machines, you have to accept a certain number of consequences. To the ‘average user’ those consequences might outweigh the benefits, but to a tech savvy, penny conscious person, it can be a very usable platform. My beige is my primary machine, sharing my desk with a PII400 running XP. Both of these computers were built a long time ago, but with great hardware and good planning, and I’d say I’ve gotten fabulous use out of the both of them! Of course, the mac is still my baby, the PC is more of a workhorse/file server.

As to the SCSI problems, I agree with the idea to check termination carefully. Often an active terminator can do a good job where as a built-in terminator (set with a jumper) might not be so great. OS X is quite sensitive to termination problems. On my system, the internal scsi bus runs the zip drive fine (at least, i’m pretty sure the zip is on the internal bus..) and I was running a 2GB drive on the external bus to swap files around. Both seemed to be working and mounting fine.

I’ve got a PCI SCSI card, an ATTO ExpressPCI PSC, which is a single channel UltraWide SCSI card that was offered as a BTO option on the original Beige G3s (and a few other models too, iirc). It worked dandy in Jaguar, and seems to be working fine in Panther, though I haven’t put any drives on it yet (thats my plan for after work). It still has the original Apple ROM on it, but I will probably flash the rom to the retail version today, so I can take advantage of driver and firmware updates that ATTO has since made available. Also, the retail firmware activates the external plug on the card, which is disabled by the apple firmware.

These cards are pretty cheap, seem to work fine in OS X (I’ll have a final report on how it works in Panther later today), and offer basic UltraWide capability. It might be a good option for people needing an extra SCSI bus.

John – I’m sure installation will get easier as XPostFacto improves. Ryan is working hard on it, and it is fantastic for an alpha product. Just wait till it hits final release! He did a great job of enabling Jaguar support on the old world macs, and with time, I’m confident that the process for Panther will become just as easy. However, Panther made lots of fundamental changes, and the G3 is a different platform than he is used to working on, so it might take some time before this is a totally streamlined process. But in the meantime, if you are persistant, you should be able to get things running! If you are uncertain, wait a few months and check on XPostFacto’s development, I bet it will be easier by then. Panther is great, but 10.2.8 is no slouch, so don’t feel too rushed.