I have a bunch of questions about my new beige G3...
Prologue:
I am a PC nerd who switched over to mac a year ago (I was into Linux, so this was natural progression). I am an A+ Certified PC technician so when giving advice don't worry I won't blow it up (at least not on purpose!)
Back to the beigey...
Okay so I picked up a beige G3. It's got 768MB Ram, 266 MHz G3, Original 6 Gig HD. I put OS X 10.2 on it via CD and updated it all the way up to 10.2.8. I even rebuilt the puppy taking it completely apart and cleaning it with isopropyl alcohol and now she looks new. I put a firewire card in her and plan on putting USB in as well.
Here are my questions:
1) I downloaded VLC and it won't run even though on their website they say they support 10.2; what gives?
2) I have a two button Alps ADB mouse and the right click acts very odd. Sometimes it will do a right click and sometimes it just select the icon. What gives with that, Is it an OS X 10.2 thing (I have only really ever played with 10.3 and 10.4)?
3) Will this Beige G3 take 10.2 Server? I would like to make a server out of her at some point.
4) Why did I have to go multiple versions backward to get bitTorrent to work? Why won't 4.0.2 work?
5) Why doesn't the floppy drive work? Is this an OS X thing or is it just bad hardware?
6) Will any PCI video card work in it? Which ones do I have to buy if I want to play DVDs on her?
7) How much of headache is the processor upgrade route? I really don't need this to be an entertainment workhorse as I own a new powerbook 15" and a TiBook 15" as well; but is it necessary if I want to watch DVDs to upgrade the processor?
Thanks for any advice you can give, it is appreciated!
You need to upgrade the video card, A, ATI rage 128 16Meg will work with OS X, OS X disables the floppy drive (there is no support for it). A CPU upgrade would not hurt, 300 or 333MHz is a very simple upgrade. I am not sure about the server program. Did you load the drivers for the mouse??. I do not know about bitTorrent as I have never used it.
Ok I'm not trying to sell you anything but I have every thing in the hardware that you need, Video card and CPU and if you not have a DVD-Rom I have one with mounting hardware. For your info $50.00 shipped in the lower 48.
You can spend more and get newer drives, faster CPUs and a better Video card but what I have listed works well with the Beige G3. A short note you do not need a DVD Decoder card for the ATI Rage 128 video card if you are using OS X 10.2, only if you are running OS 9
Be careful when upgrading something like the beige, you can easily spend more on the upgrades than something like a Blue and White or early G4 which are *much* better and faster machines.
Example:
A Graphics card would be about £60 here in the UK (eBay, more elsewhere), a CPU about £15 and a DVD-ROM another £10. This is a total of £80
A Blue and white G3 with ATI Radeon 7000 and DVD drive, 400Mb of RAM and a 350MHz Proc. would set you back about £75-80 and would be a much faster machine than an upgraded Beige.
Joel
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http://applefreaks.homeunix.net
ok here is the place to go to dl drivers to get the floppy to work http://www.darwin-development.org/floppy/ it is on the other hand hit or mis for some people but mine is working with this fix.click on floppy ftp archive and dl all 3 each one is diffrent so do the trial and error aprotch and try all 3 i would try the top one first.
I have problems with my beige G3 AIO the volume buttons dont work but they work in os 9.2 but not in os x 10.2 can any one tell me is there a way to get it to work. and the front 2 earplug jack's dont turn off the main speakers when you plug headphone's in the front 2 but the onr in the back shuts off the main speakers and that earplug is the only one that works right under os x 10.2 but every thing works normaly under os 9.2. i hope there is a fix for this has any one had this trouble under os x on a beige G3 aio or if the mt and dt has volume buttons on them i dunno if they do or not
granted this is a relatively old thread, I just figured I'd note that an OS X-hindered Mac is probably not the best thing to start out with when coming from a Windows environment...
I've been using macs for years... I've been through the triumphs and the pitfalls. I've seen progress and recession in software, hardware, ideas, and concepts. I've delt with the quirks of every mac os from system 6 through the present, and encountered hundreds of different combinations of machines and internal configurations and peripherals and OS versions.
It's hard to explain to complete mac n00bs (using that as a description, by no means do I imply it as an insult) what ADB is, why Macs have never had a "real" right click, why so many older peripherals do not work in OS X, etc etc etc... OS X is SUCH a deviation from what the Mac OS used to be, that Apple has effectively rendered any Mac with beige plastic completely and utterly obsolete or incompatible with OS X. On top of that, Apple's concept with OS X has been radically different than with their prior OS's... where incremental updates were inclusive and merely existed for the purpose of improving upon the base operating system (unless of course they really DID do something totally innovative, like how 7.6 is a "different" os than 7.1, or how 8.5 IS different from 8.1, in which case they did market it as a separate product), Apple's updates to X (10.1, 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4) have been SO drastic that they've effectively become a NEW operating system.
I dunno, it's a lot to explain, especially in the evening from someone who is exhausted and also fed up with the rigors of dealing with OS X to the point ofactually buying a WinXP machine. Seriously, I'm so disgusted with OS X and Apple's ploys that I bought a basic 2ghz pc and did a barebones install of WinXP... this machine has NEVER GIVEN ME A SINGLE PROBLEM, and it has actually completely turned around my opinion of PCs and windows- it does everything I ask it to and surprises me around every turn with what it's capable of. I still love my older Macs and using 7.6.1, OS 8.1, and 9.1... But with first-hand experience running a G3 All-In-One with OS 10.2.8, I don't think Apple could sell me any of their newer OS X products (the only reason I have the G3AIO in the first place is because I like compact Macs, I like beige Macs, but I still needed to use OS X... I figured it was the best compromise, and with a 450mhz g3 upgrade, I thought I would be golden. But when Apple released 10.3 and then 10.4, it rendered 10.2.8 almost completely useless). I realize this was a rather rambling response, but until you get either a strong older mac with OS 9, or a new and up-to-date Mac with 10.4, you'll begin to understand first-hand the frustration that some long-time Mac users have faced.
you can install OSX 10.3 and 10.4 on a beige G3 with the help of xpostfacto 3 and 4 .but i herd that 10.3 and 10.4 dont like the onboard video to much but there is a patch built in to xpostfacto to allow the use of the onboard video with not to much gripe from the O S
I highly reccomend thqat you upgrade to 10.3, it is much snappier. I is a peice of cake to insall an OS with XPostFacto.
i have experimented with the use of a IDE floppy in an USB case and ill be darned if it didnt show up in OSX when i pluged a disk in it. this was some generic IDE floppy from a pc. i have found alot of things work in USB cases with macs these days.....
OS X supports USB floppy drives just fine, it's the built-in controllers that got dropped. It's good the hear that it does work with IDE floppy drives though. Was it an LS-120 or something? Or, was it just a plain 1.44mb IDE drive and if so, who made it?
have you tried this yet. i have got my internal floppy drive to work and works good
here is a direct link to the file serv ftp://ftp.mklinux.org/pub/darwin/floppy
My beige -was- working fine in 10.2.6 with the onboard video (see my other post about the boot problems it has recently developed). I've been running X on it with very few problems for over two years.
However I never did get the floppy to work right, and I couldn't get XPostFacto to work to install 10.3 no matter what I tried. Since then it's had a problem where it forgets how to boot into OS 9 - I have to run Norton Disk Doctor from the CD each time, and fix the last-mounted volume bit on each drive. Then I can reboot into 9.
Before I tried XPF I had no problems at all.
I would say if you're happy to stick with the beige, run the supported OS (10.2.x) on it and leave the unsupported hacks alone. However, in hindsight I would probably agree with others who have suggested it's worth going to a slightly newer Mac that's supported for 10.3 or 10.4 if you can afford to. The B&W also gives you faster PCI, ATA and system bus for overall better performance.
I'll be moving my G4 ZIF, RAM and drives to a B&W motherboard I've got lying around real soon now. I haven't minded spending up on upgrades, knowing that I could transfer them to a better machine.
But if I was looking for a new box or motherboard at this stage, I'd go for an AGP G4, as the price/performance for CPU upgrades is way way better for these than for the ZIF CPU socket machines, and there's a much wider range of models to move your upgrade parts to later if you start on a base machine (G4 450). That and them being supported for the latest OS.
No floppies at all on them though
VST is the one yer thinkin' of, I think. It was a floppy drive only - no LS-120 weirdness - and the one I've got at work has different colour panels you can snap onto it to colour-coordinate with your iMac.
There was a way to get the built-in floppy working with OS X, using a floppy driver from BSD or some-such, but that may have been back in the Public Beta days.
Thats exactly what drive it was, LS120! are they superior to regular floppy drives? the person who gave it to me said it was a zip disk untill i saw it, hooked it up and it reads reg floppies as well.
I've never used one, but I know they read floppies and LS120 disks which are 120MB disks that were supposed to compete with Zip100. LS120 never reached the popularity of Zip, and I don't remember why.
i know one things for sure. its slower then death!!
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ The link look up ^^^^^^^^^^^
One thing about USB floppies, you can be sure they won't read any of the old school Mac 800k and 400k disks - no idea if OS X would read them with the internal drive hack or not.
This drive looks very cool - an internal USB floppy and flash card reader in one.
/edit/ Just had a look on epinions.com to see if anyone had reviewed this drive (nope) but it seems there are a few other manufacturers making similar drives.
Hek i could e-mail any one if they want the 3 diffrent files to try no one asked. pm me your e-mail if you want to give it a go
There are different types of G3 Beiges - some will install 10.2 no prob, some will not. Mine did not. I never tried XPostFacto, but reportedly that would have worked for me. What I WAS able to do was install 10.1 Server, and although slow as molasses, it actually worked quite well. Never had any software incompatibilites or such. I have to say though, considering what it would take to really get a Beige up to snuff (G4/1GHz CPUs are available for these machines; video cards, floppy drivers, etc...), what a pain in the arse. Put it on eBay and take the $50 and put it towards a used Graphite AGP 500, which runs the latest Ubuntu linux and OSX flawlessly. With a gig of ram, even Garageband and Soundtrack work fine. This would be impossible on even a souped-up Beige.