cringemaster Posted July 8, 2007 Share Posted July 8, 2007 Well after having some OS issues with XPostFacto and 10.4, my parents finally gave me back my Beige G3 that I bought way back when and gave to them a few years ago when our PowerMac 6150/66 "Workgroup Server" was finally to old to install flash 7 on (it still runs though ). After doing a quick look over, and looking into it, it appears the video card in my G3, which is really the only stock thing left, has some sort of weird bug that causes issues with 10.3 and 10.4 on it via XPostFacto. Besides the ATI Rage 128 with 2 MB of video ram, everything else besdies the basics have all been upgraded. The ram is up to 224 meg (more than enough for basic stuff), the processor was upgraded to a 400 Mhz G3, the 24x CD-ROM was upgraded to a CD-R/RW/DVD-ROM, and it now has 2 drives; a 6 gig (ripped from an imac) for the OS and most apps, and an 80 gig for all the media and everything else. I cleaned out the main boot drive and tried playing around with ubuntu on it and got it booting fine with the help of bootx, but i was having ethernet issues that pretty much broke the deal as being a server or basic web browsin' machine. So i grabbed a copy of OS X Server 10.2 from OiNK and did a clean install of that on it with no problem, and I now have a decent (albeit old) version of camino and itunes running on it just fine. Its been sitting like this for the last 3 weeks in my closet running non-stop since then with all sorts of apps running to check the stability, and so far, its not having any issues at all, its even playing music off my network via ethernet just fine. But I feel this is kinda a lame retirement for a great mac that has served me and my family well, and I want to do something cool (and non-destructive, unless its worth it ) with it, but I dont know what. I know for the most part you need at least 10.3.9 running to do anything useful anymore, so I plan on upgrading (via xpostfacto) to server 10.3 or 10.4, but before I do that, I need to know what kind of cheap-o video cards, usb cards, or wi-fi cards are compatable with this dinosaur of a modern mac. I also know the bus speed is a limiting factor, so I've also been pondering doing the whole "pc in a mac case" like some have been doing with G5 cases, and running OSx86 on it and giving it back to my parents (or just keeping it), but I have little experience with OSx86 and rigging up a PC from nothing, and besides that, I'd be on a budget in the neighborhood of about 300 dollors or so. But if I did want to, id like to be able to keep alot of the internal structure such as the placements for the cd and non funtional zip and floppy drive. I already have an 80 gb ide drive, so thats one less thing to buy, along with a case and a power supply. So any ideas would be greatly appreciated because its the summer, and nows the time for me to do something that takes some involvement, which is never possible when schools going on. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hecker Posted July 9, 2007 Share Posted July 9, 2007 You could use it as a server. Like for FTP, Apache and SMB. Or for downloading files. hecker Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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