Amuso Posted February 2, 2008 Share Posted February 2, 2008 Hooray! The iBook G3 800MHz I bought off of eBay arrived a few days ago. It came shipped with Tiger 10.4 fresh install, 256MB RAM and 30GB harddrive along with a CD-ROM drive and AirPort. What a nice little machine. It is quite small, and when you think of when it was introduced - well it must have been tiny back then. The design is super. No sharp edges on the keyboard and lower casing like the MacBook. Screen is 12" but 1024x768 which I am used to from my Hack with the 15" LCD monitor. Nice dual color powerplug. Not much has changed in the design, and I must say it is a robust design. It feels solid and good! Batterytime is amazing on this thing. And with no CPU fans and barely noticable HD noise it is super quiet. Upgraded to the max 640MB by inserting a 512MB stick instead of the 128MB that it came with. Speed increase is enormous. Actually this thing is fully usable still. It is not a racer, but it is far from slow. I opted not to run Leopard on it, since my parents (who are getting it) will not need any Leopard features. And since Tiger runs so smoothly and fine on it, it will do fine. Upgraded to all the latest patches and fixes. Installed iWork 08 but not iLife 08 yet. That will come later. Had some trouble connecting to my WLAN but it turned out the AirPort is b standard only, and I had my base station set to g only. Works like a charm when I enabled b+g mode. I actually want one of these laptops myself. That is how much I love it. Did I mention it was brilliant? Of course it will be a bit too slow for my video editing projects, but for a work and on-the-go machine it is perfect. Quiet, small and slim and good battery life. Might go and try a iBook G4 if I find the right deal. There is a few glitches and bugs with the graphics on this thing though. If there are long file names the last part will be cut away by icons below. And if you remove the file there will be a small blue line left where the lower text was. Pages 08 and long tables are slow on this thing. But everything else is good. Even plays xvid TV-series and movies just fine using VLC. For remote control of this machine I have opted to use vtun since the various DSL providers around here operate with DHCP public adresses and routers that only provide private adresses to the machines connecting to the Internet. Using vtun means that I will not need to preconfigure my parents router to open up any ports either. I made a small Mac OS X script that starts vtun which connects to my firewall and sets up a virtual tunnel which allows the laptop to access my LAN and I can access the laptop by a specific IP. In turn I can run Leopards VNC client to remote control the laptops desktop display and that way gain access to my parents routers and if necessary reconfigure it for them. I will also be able to help them and guide them around Mac OS X so that they will get familiar with it. I have used vtun a lot previously on FreeBSD to connect various networks for remote assistance and maintenance, so finding a vtun package for Mac OS X Tiger was pretty neat. It requires a tuntap package to be installed first, but from there it is good going. You will need to know your way around the Terminal, but most of it is pretty easy. If anybody is interested I can post links to the software I needed to get it working. Note! The vtun package and tuntap package was Tiger only, and not tested or compiled on Leopard. However I see that there is now a Leopard package as well which I am going to test out on a MacBook MB061. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Guest: thejam_* Posted April 10, 2008 Share Posted April 10, 2008 About iWork '08 on your iBook G3: I was wondering how well that's working out for you. Have you tried out Keynote a lot? Does it ever crash (iWork that is)? Basically I'm wondering because the G3 is not officially supported for iWork '08, though you seem to have installed it. I've installed it myself on my iBook G3 700MHz, and the apps open up and I was able to create a simple text-only presentation. But I haven't pushed it and I don't know if there's any disadvantage of using Keynote on the G3 beyond it being a little slow. I've found it to be fast enough so far, indeed even faster than it was when I last tried it years ago (earlier iWork version of course). Basically, is iWork '08 on a G3 reliable in practice, even though Apple doesn't want to publicly commit to support? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amuso Posted April 13, 2008 Author Share Posted April 13, 2008 About iWork '08 on your iBook G3: I was wondering how well that's working out for you. Have you tried out Keynote a lot? Does it ever crash (iWork that is)? Basically I'm wondering because the G3 is not officially supported for iWork '08...Hi, well, to be honest I havent used it much at all. Just like you, Ive just created simple text documents, a simple spreadsheet but no presentations though. All worked great, and I never experienced any problems. I gave the G3 away as a present to my parents which havent gotten around to using iWork programs yet at all.I guess it should work just great though, but there might be functions that require a newer machine, like the transition effect and stuff in KeyNote. I would just go for it and do regular saves and see if there is anything that causes it to crash at all - or not work as expected. But that would probably be very specific functions... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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