[NBLUG/talk] iMac question

Lincoln Peters anfrind at gmail.com
Tue Jul 22 21:08:18 PDT 2014


My gut feeling is that you won't be able to get any decent
web-browsing experience on a computer that old.  If you installed a
lightweight Linux distribution on one of those iMacs, you might be
able to use Dillo to browse the Internet without thrashing the swap,
but it would probably fail spectacularly if e.g. you tried to access
any modern webmail service.  Even the Midori web browser that's
popular with the Raspberry Pi gobbles up way too much memory for a
machine that old (I just tried launching it and it immediately sucked
up over 200MB of RAM).

As an alternative, you might consider using the iMacs as dumb
terminals for a more modern Linux machine.  Many years ago, I
installed a PowerPC build of Ubuntu on an iMac of the same vintage and
set it up as a terminal for a more powerful Linux machine, using
XDMCP, thereby enabling that machine to be easily used by two people
at the same time.  That would mostly free you from the constraints of
such old hardware, although it still might not allow you to e.g. play
streaming video smoothly (I never tried).

On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 8:25 PM, Alan Bloom <n1al at sonic.net> wrote:
> The community radio station I volunteer for has a pile (maybe 12-15) ancient
> iMac G3 computers that were given to us by a school a few years ago.  I'd
> like to sell them on Craig's List or somewhere to get a little money for the
> station.  I'm trying to figure out if they are worth anything and if there
> is any easy way to upgrade them to make them more useful.
>
> I took one home, plugged in a USB keyboard and mouse and it booted up fine.
> After a minor change to the LAN configuration it also connects to the
> Internet, but the browser is so old that many web sites don't display
> correctly.
>
> It is an early model G3 with the tray-loading CD drive.  It has a red case
> and machine speed of 333 MHz, which I think makes it a revision "D".  It is
> running Mac OS 8.6 and has 96 Mbytes of RAM installed.  (I believe these
> units came with 32 MB.)  The hard disc is 6 GB, so that has not been
> upgraded.
>
> Is there a reasonably-modern browser that runs on Mac OS 8.6?  Or do I need
> to upgrade the operating system?  My research seems to indicate that any
> version 9.* or the Unix-based OS X up to version 10.3.9 (Panther) is
> compatible with this version of the G3.  If I buy one copy of the OS on
> CD-ROM can I load it into multiple computers or is there some kind of
> license key that limits it to one computer?
>
> Any recommendations?  Are these things even worth bothering with?
>
> Alan Bloom
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-- 
Lincoln Peters
<anfrind at gmail.com>


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