So you bought
an original blueberry iBook four years ago, and you got more
than your fair share of usage out of it, but
these days you're not quite sure what to do with it. Or, you
really
want
get a Mac laptop to complement your desktop system, but you're
on a budget and you're wondering whether you really can get
any meaningful use out of those old tangerine iBooks being
sold on eBay for $300. Well, believe it or not, the "world's
oldest iBooks" can in fact run Panther, and run it legitimately.
Of course, there are a rather large handful of compromises
that need to be made to run Apple's newest operating system
on a machine this elderly, but it certainly can be done. In
fact, last night I proved it. Read on if you want to find out
how
investing in an extra Panther license (or a family pack) can
breathe new life into that iBook that you were just about ready
to retire:
For starters,
the iBooks to which I'm referring are the original, translucent-shelled
ones that came in blueberry and tangerine. These are the ones
with the tiny three-gigabyte hard drives. If you've got one
of the second-generation clamshell iBooks, the Indigo, KeyLime,
and Graphite ones with the shiny white exterior and the 10
GB hard drives, you'd darn well better be running Panther at
this point. ;)
I've had
my blueberry iBook since September 1999. Although that's just
a tad over four years ago, I'll put it in different terms:
it came with a whopping 32 MB of RAM, and was running (drumroll,
please...) MacOS 8.6. Over the years, I've ran every system
on it from OS 9 to the OS X Public Beta, and I loved every
minute of it. But the allure of newer and faster employer-issue
iBooks eventually left my poor blueberry gathering dust. In
fact, after seeing that the old standby could barely even fit
MacOS X 10.1.5, let alone run it decently, I never did bother
to try to cram Jaguar into an already-full hard drive. By then
I wasn't using it for anything more than the occasional trip
down memory lane anyway. Its time had come and gone, I thought,
and I even considered ditching it altogether.
Let's just
say that I'm glad I didn't. Change being the only constant
in life, I've had sudden motivation recently to get the old
iBook up and running again. I wasn't going to leave it running
10.1, and there was just no way that I was going back to OS
9, so it was Panther or bust. If you haven't already bought
Panther for your main Mac system, at this point I'll recommend
that you take a look at the $199 "Family Pack" license, which
allows
you to
install
Panther
on
up to five Macs in the household. This way, you're only paying
an extra $70 for the right to turn Panther loose on ye olde
iBook, instead of an extra $129.
You'll also
want to check and make sure that you've got enough RAM installed
to make your Panther experience livable. If you've still only
got the original 32 MB, take yourself out back and beat yourself
silly. Seriously, what's wrong with you? But even if you've
got 96 or even 160 MB, I recommend that you splurge a bit and
drop a nice 256 MB chip in your one and only slot, so as
to bring your grand total up to 288 MB of RAM. You'll thank
me later for this, even if you chicken out and leave your iBook
running OS 9. Sure, the RAM will cost you a few bucks, but
if you're going to do this, you want to do it right.
But regardless
of what you pay in terms of cash, you're going to have to make
another
payment as well: you're going to have to throw a lot of
stuff away on your iBook's little 3 GB hard drive. In fact,
if you can stomach it, you're better off backing up all your
data and then performing a "clean install," effectively
erasing every inch of your hard drive and replacing it with
a factory-fresh copy of Panther. Keep in mind that this will
leave you with no Classic environment at all, which is fine
by me, as I haven't needed to run a Classic app for personal
use in a long, long time. But your situation, of course,
might be entirely different.
The next
thing you'll need to do is to make some choices about which
of Panther's extras you can live without. While performing
the installation, you can pick and choose what you do and don't
want installed. I chose pass on every brand of printer drivers
except for Hewlett-Packard, since that's the only brand of
printer I own and the only brand I expect to own any time soon.
I also passed on every foreign-language package with the exceptions
of Spanish and Portuguese, the two languages that I'm the most
likely to encounter here in Florida. The Asian fonts also failed
to make my "mission-critical" list, as did the X11 environment
and a few others. But don't get too cute -- if you don't install
the BSD Subsystem or some other fundamental system component,
you'll be booting up to nothing at all.
The other
option is, of course, to replace your iBook's hard drive with
something roomier. After all, I suppose I'm not the only one
who sees the irony in the fact that my iPod has more hard drive
capacity than does my iBook. At some point I just might take
on the challenge of disassembling my blueberry beloved, but
not today. Even though there's obviously no longer any warranty
to violate, I don't want to kill the old thing outright. I've
taken apart many a Mac, but I once read that this particular
job requires removing somewhere north of forty screws. I'll
pass, for now. To each his own on this one.
Once you've
completed the Panther install and rebooted, you'll want to
take a tour of your hard drive and see if there's anything
else you want to throw away. But as a general rule, don't go
throwing away any of the files with the weird names and even
weirder suffixes -- those are the files that OS X uses to function.
And use common sense; trashing fifty files that are less than
a megabyte each won't clear up as much space as simply
ditching one seldom-used app that takes up fifty megs on its
own. Throwing away a few word processing documents is not the
answer.
Now, check
your hard drive capacity and see how much free space you have.
Here's where Panther starts to pay off: on the View menu, choose
"Show view options," then check the box next to "show item
info". Now, your hard drive icon will always display its total
amount of free space, updated dynamically, so you can keep
a hawk's eye view on how much space you've got to play with.
Ideally, I'd recommend keeping at least a gigabyte of free
space open, as this is the space that OS X uses for its virtual
memory scheme. In other words, the less free space you leave,
the less cheating OS X can do to supply your active apps with
the RAM that they're requesting.
The other
things I'll suggest are:
• Set your
display to "Thousands of colors". If you get used to the slightly
less perfect display quality, then you can probably also get
used to the noticeable speed boost that you gain by giving
up your "Millions of colors".
• Set Expose
to be activated by the screen corners. Working on a 12-inch
display with only 800x600 resolution, you're going to be using
Expose a lot to toggle among windows.
• Set your
Dock to disappear off the bottom (or the side) of the screen.
This will buy you an extra few dozen pixels of workspace. And
since you don't have a whole heck of a lot of room for too
many Dock icons, only place your most common apps there, and
then drag your "Applications" folder into the right side of
the Dock, giving you click-and-hold access to all of your apps.
• If you
do decide to keep the Classic environment around, set Classic
to go to sleep rather quickly, and if you've got the guts,
trim your Extension set down to the point that you're running
the most bare-bones OS 9 system possible. Here's a hint: if
you don't plan on actually booting back to OS 9, deactivate
nearly all of your Control Panels (except for "Startup Disk,"
which you'll need to et back to OS X if you ever do accidentally
boot back to 9). AppleTalk, TCP/IP, and most other Classic
settings are now a slave to OS X anyway, so there's no real
point in letting those Control Panels gobble up resources.
If you
really want to have some fun, get yourself an AirPort card
for your old iBook. Then get another AirPort card for your
desktop Mac. Then go into the Sharing panel on your
desktop Mac, turn on Internet Sharing, and now your desktop
Mac will share out its Cable or DSL connection to your old
iBook. Now, you can take your iBook anywhere that its wireless
range will allow, and you can simply tap into your existing
Internet connection. It's almost too easy to set up.
Once you've
gotten things set up the way you think you want them, and once
you've put your setup through its paces, you'll then be in
a position to fine-tune things to get them the way you really
want them. If you find that you don't have room for your music
collection on your iBook, you can simply turn on iTunes sharing
on your desktop Mac, and tap into your music without needing
to sacrifice any space on your iBook. The same goes for any
other files, if you want to turn on File Sharing and mount
your desktop Mac's hard drive right on your iBook's screen.
Turn on USB Printer Sharing if you want to experience what
it's like to send a print job through thin air to your desktop
Mac, which will cheerfully print out your job to its printer.
The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.
In
short, have fun with the whole experience. You've taken a
now-vintage piece
of
Mac hardware
and
milked
it to
the point
where you're
successfully
running the latest operating system, and using some of the
latest software toys, long after its relevant life was supposed
to have come and gone. Sure, your blueberry iBook still doesn't
have FireWire, or a CD burner, or a video card of any merit,
and there's no escaping that 800x600 resolution...but don't
let that stop you. If you really do have no use for your old
iBook, why not "Pantherize" it and pass it off to your niece
or nephew?
Totally
New Feature Alert: readers
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