Mac OS X + 8600/300

[thedbp]

Hi all! Just wanted to too you about some of my experiences after installing X onto my 8600/300.

First, the instructions and necessary files posted by Ryan Rempel at http://homepage.mac.com/ryanrempel are probably one of the coolest thigns anyone has done with or for X yet.

My 8600 is all stock Apple hardware, no PCI cards, 128 MB RAM, 4 MB VRAM, and the 300MHz 604e processor. Please note, I am NOT running on a G3 or G4 upgrade!

The installation went flawlessly after following Ryan's directions on how to make the boot disk. It didn't take terribly long, maybe 30-35 minutes tops. It wasn't significantly slower than the installation on my G3 350.

The nice little "Welcome" splash animation seemed to load too slow to be displayed properly - it went into the setup screen were you begin typing immediately, although the sound played, albeit out of sync. Then I remembered that the same thing happend when I installed X the second time on my G3. So maybe a bug and not a hardware issue.

As soon as it was up and running, I installed all the updates available, and the speed increases between each update were just as much as they had been on my G3. For reference, I've also installed and used X on a G4 450 at work, although I have less of a chance to use it there.

Right now I'm running Photoshop in Classic, MSMessenger in Classic, the calculater, stickies, IE 5.1 in X, and its pretty darn snappy. Classic, while not terribly speedy, is usable. This will probably be alieviated somewhat when I move my 9.1 partition back onto the internal HD. Right now I'm running it off an old Apple external 1 Gig SCSI that is patched through a scanner. At the very least, I'm going to move the drive to connect directly with the comptuer It was sort of a temporary solution as I only have the stock 4 Gig drive in the 8600, and space is tight. This is more of an experiment, and now I know I need to buy a bigger drive!

My impressions are that X obviously runs great on older PPC chips. Why apple didn't include support for Old World machines is beyond me - this model, while at the higher end of Old World machines, comparitively, runs X beautifully, and even seems somewhat snappier and more responsive than 9.1. If anyone has an older PPC lying around, I would DEFINITELY reccomend giving X a shot.

Now the interesting tidbit: X's Apple System Profiler recognized the video input card on this model. How about that! Now if they'll just make iMovie so it'll take input from analog sources...

I'm running in thousands of colors, 800x600 resolution. It really helps it to seem faster, although I'm sure the Puma update will help out immensely, as it will for all the other models, and if I had a better video card, that would help too. But all in all, I'm extraordinarily impressed with how well this 8600 runs with no major upgrades whatsoever.

now i have to update my signature
zjd