Something That Happened.

The following story should have no appeal to normal people; it is for people like me, geeky and entertained by technical accounts of installation and troubleshooting headaches. Unless you're easily entertained, I encourage you to read or listen to one of my prior stories instead.

I have a PowerBook G3 I took a chance on at Goodwill, purchasing for $60 knowing that it was having some issues. It appears I've resolved those issues by reformatting the hard drive and temporarily installing a new operating system. This is what I was hoping for, and so far so good. So now the plan is to install the operating system I will be using going forward; the question is, which one do I choose to use?

Since this is an Apple computer, and an old one at that - a PowerBook G3 "Wallstreet" running at 233MHz - I have the following choices: 1) any flavor of Mac OS from 8 through X, or 2) Linux. Currently I have OS 9.2.2 installed, the highest of Apple's "Classic" operating systems prior to their switch to OS X. If I stick with Apple, I'd prefer to run the fastest flavor of OS X, which is (thankfully) their latest release, Tiger. Yet I've just found out that Tiger introduces an issue of concern to PowerBook owners: it stresses the CPU more than prior releases. This causes the CPU to get hot and the fan to spin up frequently, something Panther and other releases of OS X rarely did. This makes for a noisy PowerBook, and I'd guess it doesn't help preserve battery life much, either.

I also have the option of installing Linux. Ubuntu is the current Linux distribution I'm considering; it installs on old PowerBooks and provides access to the ever-increasing variety of applications (most of them free) available to Linux users. Yet I'm uncertain as to whether my new wireless PC card will be compatible with Ubuntu; I have some evidence it will but it seems that Mac OS X is more certain to perform in that area. Having a reliable wireless setup is very important to me - in fact, it's the main reason I purchased the PowerBook.

Installation itself may also be an issue, since I don't currently have a CD/DVD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, or a reliable network connection to install from. I was able to install OS 9 only after purchasing some cables on eBay, networking the PowerBook to an old Umax (Macintosh clone), and using its CD-ROM drive to install from. The problem is, the Umax doesn't always want to recognize it's own CD-ROM drive, so I often have to reboot several times before the drive shows up. That's not even the half of it, for even when it does recognize the drive, there's no guarantee it'll show up on my PowerBook, too. I'm not certain why this happens; there's clearly a bit of SCSI Voodoo going on here. I only know that some mystical series of reboots between my PowerBook and the Mac clone sooner or later brings up the OS install disc's icon on my PowerBook, and when it does I jump on the opportunity to run the installer. During this series of exercises I feel like a circus clown performing his juggling routine, flaming scsi-enabled Macs flying through the air. I suppose I should simply be happy the drive shows up at all, but you can understand why I'm not exactly looking forward to my next install, which has the potential to provide even more comedy.

All this said, I'm willing to go through some trouble in order to get the operating system of my dreams installed on this computer. I don't believe OS 9.2 is it, though it's a fine operating system for those who, well, don't need OS X or Linux. I think I do, however, unless someone know of a way I can get my wireless PC adapter to work under OS 9. (The PC card is a D-Link DWL-G630.) Email your suggestions, if you have any.