Old G3 worth my time?

I

industripop

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We have an old blue G3 here at work and they want to throw it away. Would it be worth my while to even bother taking it home? I currently use a G4 at home and thought maybe I could use the G3 for data storage or something. Just seems a waste to throw it away, you know?

Maybe it's the soft spot in my heart for all things Mac.

Is there anything else I can do with this thing?
 
You can install OS X on it if you up the memory enough. You can also install Ubuntu Linux and use it as a server. I just recently installed Ubuntu 6.06 "Dapper Drake" on a 600 MHz iMac G3 with only 256 MB for desktop use and it was quite responsive. I was able to browse the web with Firefox, edit pictures with Gimp, and listen to streaming music using RhythmBox. All with nary a hitch. :)

Or you could donate it to Goodwill or even Apple. Apple will take the old Macs as well, especially if you're trading in. Just don't expect a ton of savings....it IS some years old now. But that doesn't make it any less useful.
 
cool, thanks for the responses guys. this is the mac in question:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/93847024@N00/188793398/

i knew i could use this baby. the powers that be where i work have this mode of thinking that if it isn't new, is isn't worth keeping. that's a good thing sometimes, but very wasteful. when i was in college, i dreamed about having a computer like this. who knew years later, i'd get one for free?

also, nix, thanks for showing me the flikr.com site. very useful!
 
You're welcome. :)

From a corporation/educational inst. I can understand why they would get rid of it. They usually can afford to upgrade to something better for what their needs and wants. But as they say, "one man's trash is another man's treasure." ;)
 
get it if you can. like nix said, its still has a long life. i still don't own a native g3, and still kick myself for not getting one for $10 when i had the chance. sure it needed ram and a hard drive, but like all geeks, i had that stuff laying around. but for some strange reason i passed it up, and never have seen it again. :(
 
it's in my trunk as we speak. i swear though, if i bring it in the house and leave pieces laying around my wife is gonna kill me. need my own room for this kind of stuff.
 
Is there anyway that you can install Ubuntu Linux and keeping Mac OS X, like a dual-boot thing? Jw, someone reminded me of this.
 
industripop said:
it's in my trunk as we speak. i swear though, if i bring it in the house and leave pieces laying around my wife is gonna kill me. need my own room for this kind of stuff.
Click to expand...

LOL! I know EXACTLY where you're coming from. ::ha::

And DarkAngel_x, yes you can dual boot. I recommend installing OS X first and repartitioning your drive during the OS X installation so that you have enough space for the installation of Linux on it. I usually split the drive in half, but that's up to you. Consider that when you partition, just create a Mac OS X partition and then leave the rest unallocated so that can be partitioned during the Linux installation. Remember also that for the Linux installation you're going to need at least three partitions: one for the bootstrap (which will be formatted HFS to hold yaboot and other kernel info), one for the swap (I usually make this twice the amount of the memory in the machine...in other words, 512 MB if you have 256 MB RAM installed), and the rest of the space for everything else (you can use one partition for "/" or you can make smaller partitions to your liking). For the Linux filesystem, I recommend using reiserfs since I haven't been successful with XFS. I don't recommend ext3 since it's really slow compared to reiserfs.

As for Ubuntu, I recommend downloading the Alternate CD installation since I've had problems installing with the Live CD they now use as default. The Alternate CD install is the same as the installation in Breezy, so it shouldn't be all too different.
 
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