10.1 Beige - floppy, video, printer fixes?

S

SteveB

Registered
Has anyone tried a very recent build of 10.1 on a Desktop G3?

I'm interested in the following:
1. has the video driver been accelerated for Rage & Rage Pro chips?
2. are built-in floppy disks supported?
3. does the printer port work?
4. do external SCSI CD burners work?
5. and (most importantly) is it stable?

I'm sure that a lot of owners of G3s including Beige Desktops, Towers, All-in-One, Wallstreet Powerbooks, and original iMacs will be interested in some or all of these issues.

On my 400MHz Beige G3 10.04 is just miserable. Once I tried to do 'real work' with it for a day and it was way too unstable - Classic kept crashing with Adobe applications, the rainbow coloured circle in place of the mouse cursor and start swirling, nothing could be launched, or even killed with the force quit function (and this list goes on and on). iMovie2 is very slow on playback and dropped frames all over the place.

Things work like a charm under 9.1 or 8.6 (including iMovie2 - it doesn't drop frames).

Also, 10.04 doesn't seem to like two IDE drives on my system. I have a 10mb drive on one of the IDE buses (jumpered to master), and another 20mb IDE drive (master) on the same chain as the CD (slave). The system seems to work smoother and hang less frequently if this second drive is not connected. Actually I couldn't even install OS X with two hard disks attached, I had my CD temporarily jumpered to 'master' and the hard disk on this chain jumpered to 'slave'. The install would NOT start until I disconnected my extra hard disk from the cable chain after the CD. Strange.

Have any or all of this issues been fixed?
There's nothing wrong with my machine under previous OS versions. (and no, I'm not going to buy a new Mac this year so please don't suggest it, perhaps a G5 in a year or two).

Let me know how 10.1 works on G3s....
Thanks.
- Steve

Beige G3 400Mhz, 512mb RAM, Firewire/USB card, 10/100 BaseT card, 10&20mb HDs, Plextor 8/20 CDR
 
Beige G3s only came as fast as 266Mhz. If you have an expansion card that company needs to provide OS X drivers that take advantage of their cards.
 
Originally posted by SteveB
Has anyone tried a very recent build of 10.1 on a Desktop G3?

I'm interested in the following:
1. has the video driver been accelerated for Rage & Rage Pro chips?
2. are built-in floppy disks supported?
3. does the printer port work?
4. do external SCSI CD burners work?
5. and (most importantly) is it stable?
Click to expand...

Yeah, I was wondering some of the same stuff when I first got 10.

1) I think the video has been accelerated all alonge for that chipset, it has run pretty nice on the stock video, as well as the ati rage orion card I had in there. How much video ram do you have? Oh, and 10.1 has 20% faster open gl, btw, so the silly animations and such will run faster in the finder.

2) Built in floppy disks. Well, I share your feelings there. I don't think they ever will be. I'm not even sure if they are supported on the intel version of Darwin. If you must, spend more money (yes, *more* money) on a usb floppy drive. The SmartDisk by VST seams to work well on my dad's power book - never really needed it on my Beige G3, but I bet it would work.

3) Printer ports and Modem ports work in 10.x.x. Just only as Serial ports. Currently the Mac OS doesn't recognize serial printers. Its silly. If you want to attach text terminals to the ports you can use them as terminals, but you can't use a silly printer. I bet someone with a lot of unix experiance could port lpd or something some day, but for now, more money is needed (USB to serial adaptor, or a usb printer, yay!). Also, it is possable to buy an old 68k mac from ebay or something, attach the printer to it, install system 8 or so on it and share the printer over a network, that works nicely. But again, I think its pure sillyness how some things sort of work.

4) I'm not posative, but I bet they will. If apple bothers makeing dvd burns make in 10.1, they better support a few scsi burners...

5) Well, I only had 10.0.0-4 crash on me twice and I had it running almost continuesly from march 24 to present day, rebooting only as needed (or when the power went out...). Perhaps its worth detailing some of your crashes a bit more. Ever try loading up the console.app to see what error messages are being logged? Its offten very usefull.

As far as my Beige days go (new Quicksilver now...), I really miss that computer. The serial ports were cool because I could attach my old Motorola terminal to them with an a/b switch and have utter coolness... It ran fine for me. It wasn't extremely quick, I remember +20 bounces to launch iTunes. But if you get a better graphics card, a removable storage solution, and either a usb printer or a usb-to-printer port adaptor, you should be set until the G5 hits (let me know when that happens, so I can start saving again!).

Bottom line, make the most of it while you have it, the beige g3's were quite robust computers.

And as for your hard disk errors, again, check the console, and if you can't figure anything out, call apple. They have really helped me in the past. Although you might wait on the phone for 30mins to an hour on bad days, they are pretty good over there.

Also, as a side note, beige g3's run yellow dog linux quite nicely. And much faster than they run Mac OS X, in my opinion.
 
Originally posted by AdmiralAK
Beige G3s only came as fast as 266Mhz. If you have an expansion card that company needs to provide OS X drivers that take advantage of their cards.
Click to expand...

Actually the Beige G3s came in at 233, 266, 300, and 333 MHz speeds.
I have a ZIF card CPU replacement on my machine to take it up to 400MHz, with a 200MHz (2:1) backside cache. Translation: This CPU upgrade will be 100% compatible, and btw absolutely no OS X or other drivers are needed. This is unlike all other CPU upgrades. Fortunately at that the time the Beige G3 came out Apple only made a single motherboard for all of the machines including the 333 MHz tower, and they configured them by putting in different CPU daughterboards. The machine was designed to go well beyond 333MHz depending on the way jumpers were set for the bus multipliers (perhaps it could be taken up to 667 or 800 MHz if IBM or Motorola made such a chip...)
 
After lot of software updates and patches I found that I had a SCSI cable with wrong connections in pin 17,18,51,52 on the 68pin connector.
This happened me before with a scanner, now I can write CD's under OSX 10.1.5 with Toast 5.1.4 and an external Matsushita 8x Writer!
The correct conections should be:
***50pin > 68pin connector***
12 > NC instead of 17
13 > 17 & 18 instead of 18
37 > NC instead of 51
38 > 51 & 52 & 17 & 18 instead 52
So if you have an external SCSI CD-Writer and when you burn CD's your writer hangs buy a good SCSI cable!!!
 
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