Tiger in the Beige G3 and A Few Observations on it's Behaviour..
I am SO happy!
I'd been trying to get Tiger into my Frankenbeige for almost a year. I pulled all the PCI cards out and left IN the 1.0Ghz Sonnett ZIF card - it runs w/o the Sonnet Enabler and self-reports as a G4 600mhz card.
It was an almost flawless install but for the screen blacking out thing RIGHT as it was getting ready to have me switch to the second install disk.
That was easy enough to recover from, by rebooting back through XPostFacto4 and picking up the install - I ended up just fiddling with the mouse and keeping it 'awake' through the finish. (would have to do the same thing with my Panther installs to get them to take)
First thing to install was the Sonnet software, THEN reboot back to OS 9 and shut down.
Installed the Radeon 9200, the USB card and the FireWire AND swapped out the Apple CD drive I'd installed with, to the Pioneer SuperDrive.
4 PRAM zaps later all the hardware is sitting pretty and then boot into Tiger.
Heaven.
I'd been trying to finger out a way to get the networking from OS9 to OSX on my home network to function right and it just never did anything but hang if a file bigger than 500k was transferred.
As the beige is officially the Household Jukebox, since it's connected to the stereo system and I burn my vinyl LPs and tapes into it, it was getting old moving all the mp3's around with the external hard drive or the memory sticks - ALSO, OS9 only supported USB 1.1 so it was s-l-o-w-e-r than molasses in winter moving files on OR off the externals.
Once Tiger was in I took ALL the system updates before ANYTHING else, so there'd be NO conflicts on any later installed software.
I discovered last night with the latest QuickTime installed and the Perian codec pack in that MOST of the DiVX avi files I have will play smoothly! The high res stuff is right out but running on the native monitor resolution of 1024x768 in fullscreen mode only uses 65-90% of the processor and the bus manages to sustain the video handily. There's only a few points that I'll notice frames dropping and oddly enough, it's in places where there's low action onscreen so I think it may be an issue with coding compression that isn't visible on faster machines.
iTunes took FOREVER to load the library and if there is a way to get around that album art indexing - it took LONGER than the OS install! - I'd love to know about it. I don't care about the 'cover flow' view, it's an eye-candy function I've no interest in whatsoever.
My Unsanity ShapeShifter control panel took well enough but the CrystalClear skin, with the alpha channel input manager put the video right into flick-o-vision mode, so that was a wash. Shame too, since that is the prettiest skin with video running over it there is, esp. if you have a dark desktop as I do.
I DID need to get PatchBurn4 to make the SuperDrive play nice, I believe not having it in the computer when I installed Tiger was the culprit, but after three failed Tiger installs WITH it I decided the CD-ROM was probably a safer bet.
Right now, I've got some .shn files of Grateful Dead shows being unpacked on the Beige and it's chugging along quite nicely. I may see how it handles hulu.com later today, though I don't hold out much hope - anyways the video is a fun extra, the music is the main focus of the thing, and having it run over the home network is the icing on the cake.
I am SO happy with this! Not bad for a 10 year old box. Not at all.
Deb.
I'd been trying to get Tiger into my Frankenbeige for almost a year. I pulled all the PCI cards out and left IN the 1.0Ghz Sonnett ZIF card - it runs w/o the Sonnet Enabler and self-reports as a G4 600mhz card.
It was an almost flawless install but for the screen blacking out thing RIGHT as it was getting ready to have me switch to the second install disk.
That was easy enough to recover from, by rebooting back through XPostFacto4 and picking up the install - I ended up just fiddling with the mouse and keeping it 'awake' through the finish. (would have to do the same thing with my Panther installs to get them to take)
First thing to install was the Sonnet software, THEN reboot back to OS 9 and shut down.
Installed the Radeon 9200, the USB card and the FireWire AND swapped out the Apple CD drive I'd installed with, to the Pioneer SuperDrive.
4 PRAM zaps later all the hardware is sitting pretty and then boot into Tiger.
Heaven.
I'd been trying to finger out a way to get the networking from OS9 to OSX on my home network to function right and it just never did anything but hang if a file bigger than 500k was transferred.
As the beige is officially the Household Jukebox, since it's connected to the stereo system and I burn my vinyl LPs and tapes into it, it was getting old moving all the mp3's around with the external hard drive or the memory sticks - ALSO, OS9 only supported USB 1.1 so it was s-l-o-w-e-r than molasses in winter moving files on OR off the externals.
Once Tiger was in I took ALL the system updates before ANYTHING else, so there'd be NO conflicts on any later installed software.
I discovered last night with the latest QuickTime installed and the Perian codec pack in that MOST of the DiVX avi files I have will play smoothly! The high res stuff is right out but running on the native monitor resolution of 1024x768 in fullscreen mode only uses 65-90% of the processor and the bus manages to sustain the video handily. There's only a few points that I'll notice frames dropping and oddly enough, it's in places where there's low action onscreen so I think it may be an issue with coding compression that isn't visible on faster machines.
iTunes took FOREVER to load the library and if there is a way to get around that album art indexing - it took LONGER than the OS install! - I'd love to know about it. I don't care about the 'cover flow' view, it's an eye-candy function I've no interest in whatsoever.
My Unsanity ShapeShifter control panel took well enough but the CrystalClear skin, with the alpha channel input manager put the video right into flick-o-vision mode, so that was a wash. Shame too, since that is the prettiest skin with video running over it there is, esp. if you have a dark desktop as I do.
I DID need to get PatchBurn4 to make the SuperDrive play nice, I believe not having it in the computer when I installed Tiger was the culprit, but after three failed Tiger installs WITH it I decided the CD-ROM was probably a safer bet.
Right now, I've got some .shn files of Grateful Dead shows being unpacked on the Beige and it's chugging along quite nicely. I may see how it handles hulu.com later today, though I don't hold out much hope - anyways the video is a fun extra, the music is the main focus of the thing, and having it run over the home network is the icing on the cake.
I am SO happy with this! Not bad for a 10 year old box. Not at all.
Deb.
MacPro 2.6Ghz w/2 dumpster-dive CRT monitors.., Mac OS X (10.4.11), Beige G3 MT w/1Ghz Sonnet G4 ZIF w/ OS 9.2.2 and 10.4.11
