[NBLUG/talk] iMac question

[Allan Cecil]

I have put 10.X on G3 Mac's before with good success.  I have also managed to sell them to art collectors. They should bring in at least a little money for your cause.

Best of luck,

A.C.
******

On Jul 22, 2014 9:08 PM, Lincoln Peters <anfrind at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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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> > talk at nblug.org 
> > http://nblug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk 
>
>
>
> -- 
> Lincoln Peters 
> <anfrind at gmail.com> 
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