iMac G4/800 17" What can I do with it in 2017?

alex7375 wrote:

Yay !....I just received the iMac PPC yesterday and set it up. It came with a recover disk and OS-X Tiger disk.

It is really HEAVY !....steel construction. I ran a hardware test and everything passed.

What I want to do is multi boot Classic 9.1 / Tiger / Leopard.

I do not have the Classic 9.1 macOS. So I will have to purchase.

I will also have to purchase a Leopard install DVD.

What size partitions should I use for each OS ?

If you are going to attempt to change out the internal hard drive for something only about 50 GBs innsize larger only have one OS X version on that hd and make it the more recent OS X 10.5.8 Leopard.

Put OS X 10.4 Tiger and MacOS 9.1 on an external hard drive. FireWire, even FireWire 400 is much faster than the USB 1.0 ports you have on that iMac.

So, purchase external FW hard drive/s ONLY to boot and run other OS X and Mac OS Classic version/s.

I currently have a 80gb HD however I think I will upgrade to a 500gb HD. just so that I can multiboot.

Macs back then didn't have internal hardware support for super large internal hard drives.

You wil have to use an large external FireWire 400/800 hard drive/s if you want to partition for different OS versions. The iMac's internal hard drive size can only read up to a 128 GB internal hard drive storage size

What I really wanted this computer for is for MacOS 9.1 Classic.

I hooked up the iMac to a Wifi bridge and powered it on. Everything works great.

I installed Tiger and updates and may apps no longer work.

So I installed fourtenfox web browser and email client firebird.

Works okay now. Skype is no longer supported on osx tiger.

Look for an older version of Yahoo Mesenger for the Mac OS 10.4 and later 10.5.

Yahoo Messenger supports online video and audio calls

Also, look for older Yahoo messemger companion app called Adium.

iTunes can not connect to itunes service so I assume it is no longer supported.

You may not be able to connect to Apple's iTunes stores with the version of iTunes under OS X 10.4 Tiger, but can STILL use iTunes as it was originally intended. As an internal media storage and jukebox player. You should be able to rip and store music and video on that G4. You just be able to purchase any online content from Apple iTunes servers.

Buying content from within iTunes MAY, or may bot, change with an update to OS X 10.5.8 Leopard and an updated iTunes versions for OS X 10.5.8

I stopped using my 2003 PMG4 MDD in 2011 and the version of iTunes on OS X 10.5.8 was, at that time, still able to access and purchase content from Apple's iTunes Store servers.

Don't know about now, obviously.

I am also going to get an iWork DVD and MS-Office 2008 DVD.

You'll need both iWork versions for 10.4 and 10.5. Those versions are pretty cheap to find these days.

I basically just want to set it up for email, light web browsing, and word processing, Office apps.

Any ideas on how to best setup this iMac ?

Not that I know of, think of it as a research project.

Web browser for 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard.

TenFourFox

http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/