Wow. Just, just wow.
Busted my B&W out of the closet, scrounged up enough parts to get her humming, threw on Mac OS 9.2.2, and here I am, on the thing, thanks to Internet Connection Sharing and my MacBook. Lookie:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; iCab 3.0.5; Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS)
OK, so maybe it isn't as old school Mac as some of us could come up with (Mosaic on an SE, anyone? 
) but still very fun, and a pretty big shock in contrast to what we have become used to with modern OSes such as Mac OS X.
The biggest thing I noticed right away: my God, where's my pre-emptive multitasking? If you have one Web page open, and it's "busy," you can forget even getting switched over to another Web page. For seconds. Many of them, in fact.
Soo, really I just wanted to post from it. 
If someone enjoys this, awesome, if not, I already did.
-- Macinjosh
Yeah, so about 2 minutes after I posted that, I pointed iCab at ihnatko.com thinking, "would be sooo funny if Andy was checking out that kind of thing, and suddenly ran into this user-agent string."
It probably didnt show up all that much though, as his Celestial Web presence knocked iCab in the dirt. Oh sure, I could have waited until I closed some things, and probably gotten 'er back... but it took like 2 minutes to switch from iCab to the Finder. _All_ of two minutes.
Instead I force-quit it and shut the B&W down. Linux, maybe? OS X again? I dunno. But odd as it may seem, the whole effort was dashedly worthwhile. May even kick the tires a few more times.
-- Macinjosh
funny, the B&W 400mhz is the newest mac ive ever had! hahaha
Hey, I could have said the same before I ended up with my MacBook. Looks like you've definitely had another rig since then, by your sig though.
It would also be cool to turn the B&W into our file server, but I already have got one up on a 450MHz PC...
-- Macinjosh
yessah' i have a machine that i hope will last me a few years of heavy gaming. if it were only legal (and easy), id have a variant of X on here lol.
1) Ubuntu, alternate with XFCE (Xubuntu) slimmed down
2) Debian netinst ISO and build up from there
3) OS X (lol, cant resist, unless something else works really well before that)
I really should go Debian netinst first, as I know that's where I am going to get the most speed. But the tinkerer in me says try everything that's easy, first.
-- Macinjosh
i had the best luck with panther vs. tiger on my G3.
That's a good thing to hear, as I moved not all that long ago, and the only thing, for the life of me that I can find is the first Panther CD. Let's see if I can deselect enough stuff to just use that...
I didn't get Linux to boot properly, but that may have been my fault. I'm doing too many things at once, at the mo.
-- Macinjosh
IIRC Ubuntu went on with out much trouble on my B&W. I haven't tried Debian on PPC in a while. The biggest drawback to using Linux is the lack of good Flash players for PPC. Otherwise you can run a modern FireFox and be better off overall than OS 9 if you can live with out Flash.
I would say the same with my Clamshell iBook. On my B&W machines however, I run 10.4 pretty comfortably. Granted one has 1Gb of RAM and the other has 512Mb. 10.3 would probably run a little smoother in the Finder. It just kinda sucks having to use older versions of Safari and whatnot in 10.3
I've had 10.4 on a 400MHz B&W with 1GB RAM and it ran acceptably, though not fast. I'm sure any sort of CPU upgrade would help, esp. G4. My 600MHz G3 iBook runs 10.4 just fine on 640MB.
Just to have this here for posterity's sake, note the following about putting Linux on a B&W:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=455261
Seems Linux doesn't like booting from slave devices. Which of course is how mine is set up right now.
The hard drive in mine is presently where the Zip was, as along with everything else I've lost, I dont seem to have the mounting plate that bolts into the bottom of the case.
So, I had to make the HD master, and the CD-ROM slave in order to get 9 to boot from the hard drive (wouldn't the other way around,) and that worked for X so I left it as such. I could flip those jumpers again and try Linux, I suppose; eventually i will want to.
Had a 500MHz G4 in this, 80GB hard drive, 512MB of RAM at one point; got rid of it and got a Dell Latitude C600 though with the proceeds a while back. I could get her back to where she was for a fraction of the money involved before; but meh, I dunno. Right now she's just a "this is my machine to play around with, without consequence" computer.
And it's fun to see what you can get out of so little, too. Basic web surfing, IMing and e-mail would be plenty doable in OS X w/128 MB of RAM, and a 350 MHz proc.
I have been thinking, if it weren't for my lack of experience, that it would be nice to make a set of packages / distro for the elderly PowerPCs, based on Debian perhaps? This would be a great machine as a model.
-- Macinjosh
Used 128MB PC-100 DIMMs are nearly free around here (~$5). I have a hard time not filling out every machine that can take them...
well, it was until I got my 500mhz pismo, not much faster (actually with the improved bus everything feels faster)
my 400mhz B&W G3 is running overclocked to 450, with a gig of RAM ($60), a 120gb HD, a DVD burner, a USB 2.0 card, bluetooth, and I am about to flash a nvidia Geforce 2 MX 200 once OS 9 gets done installing, so I should have something that can finally do quartz extreme. Keep the Rage 128 around and use it in another machine.
it's amazing how useful and versatile the old smurftower is after all these years. I don't do much gaming (though now that I have a MS sidewinder, things might change), so it is perfect for the basics: email, IM, web, and the occasional office document.
-digital
Not that this is anything less than obvious, but I got tired of jumper-flipping, ran an 80-conductor cable to the hard drive, where the Zip used to be, ta-da, CD-ROM and hard drive both master(s,) I'll never have to do that again.
Watch that cable though, on your PCI cards, et cetera and make sure that it isn't getting pinched as you close things up.
I'm gonna do some similar straightening, and probably hook up on some stuff to cram in there in a few weeks.
-- Macinjosh
Edit: Here's a good how-to on going minimalistic, in my opinion; of course you have to ignore the x86-specific stuff... I use Debian for it, and not Ubuntu:
http://www.binonabiso.com/en/Ubuntu-miniRAM-HOWTO.html
This is quite a bit more recent, and should be applicable to other distros with small changes: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/LowMemorySystems
EDIT: I once accidentally installed a full FreeBSD/KDE system on a 486/50 w/ 8MB. It ran, but stupidly slowly. Any chance you have to increase RAM will make your life much more enjoyable.
a) Awesome link.
b) Bwahahaha, on a 486/50, 8MB o' RAM. I thought booting Puppy and DSL on 32MB, from a USB 'thumb' drive (running @ 1.0), PII 333 was purty bad. I never thought I would see the desktop on either of them... Puppy _did_ actually pull off using some of that 32MB as a RAM disk, and then there was some tiny slice left over. Good times.
-- Macinjosh
You'd never know it's not running OS X, right? Right?
((crickets chirping))
-- Macinjosh
Who hasnt wanted to do 3 or 4, or 8 heheh ... monitors with everything right there in front of you? Could stuff this thing full of PCI cards, VNC/RDP/etc into a few boxes, have them all right there, one displaying news and weather and stuff.. my new tinker shed/shop has a loft that would be perfect for that.
-- Macinjosh
synergy to run the setup from one kb and mouse... multiple logins to a box to reduce the number of boxes in question... would have to set up apci on this on the command line, then put a strip in to off all the monitors if I'm not right in front of it... oh Lord, here we go
You'd probably kill the poor computer's PCI bus with 4 dual head PCI video cards. It is, however, a fantastic idea, if you have that many monitors laying around (and don't mind the immense power consumption).