Running Leopard on a 800Mz iBook

1. Imaging
2. Cloning
3. Hack the installer

Philsy said:

Yikes, that looks involved. I'll give it a go, though.

Thanks!

Phil

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Imaging or cloning from a spare faster Mac would be the easiest ways.

The only problem is that you can't keep the user files unless you back it up and restore it.

This only gets harder with multiple users.

On a side note: if you don't go through the registration process and make an image of the machine in that state. It'll ask to register the machine when you make image other machines.

Philsy said:

Sorry to be thick, but how do imaging and cloning work? I'm guessing it's copying the contents of the hard drive from another Mac to the iBook. I'd be happy to delete what's on the iBook at the moment, so that's not a problem.

Thanks

Phil

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Cloning would be directly copying over the files from one Mac to another.

Imaging would be copying the contents of a Mac to an image file and then using that image to install OS X onto another Mac. (Great for work!)

I suggest going the cloning route since it requires the least amount of hardware and technical knowledge.

I don't know if SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner support Leopard cloning yet though.

And I hope you got more then one Leopard license.

What about connecting one of you iMacs over firewire and selecting the iBooks disc as the target install disc? I don't know if this works but I don't see why it shouldn't...

1. Mac with Leopard (cloning master)
2. Second Mac in FireWire target disk mode
3. FireWire Cable connecting them
4. Clone from Master

Arne said:

What about connecting one of you iMacs over firewire and selecting the iBooks disc as the target install disc? I don't know if this works but I don't see why it shouldn't...

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This works as well!

The faster Mac that can run Leopard will think that the slower Mac is just a hard drive.

You should be able to upgrade archive and install, or erase and install on the iBook.

Philsy said:

I'm in the process of upgrading via Firewire.

Note that I was unable to do this via my Intel iMac because it needed the destination disk to be reformatted as GUID; I assume because so it could be used as a start-up disk. Therefore, I doing it via my G5 iMac.

Thanks again for your help - much appreciated.

Phil

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I was going to mention that you'd need a PowerPC master.

Sorry about that.

I pays to keep Macs around.

Philsy said:

Job done - the iBook is running Leopard very well.

Thanks again for your help.

Phil

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By running well, does it run as fast as Tiger did in your opinion? I really want to upgrade my mom's G4 iMac (800 mhz), so I can use iChat to help her when she has "issues". But I don't necessarily want to slow her down too much. So any additional info would be appreciated.

Philsy said:

Job done - the iBook is running Leopard very well.

Thanks again for your help.

Phil

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are their things that dont work in Leopard on an iBook?
Front Row does it work?

torn80 said:

By running well, does it run as fast as Tiger did in your opinion? I really want to upgrade my mom's G4 iMac (800 mhz), so I can use iChat to help her when she has "issues". But I don't necessarily want to slow her down too much. So any additional info would be appreciated.

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I 2nd that request for info, with additional note as to how much installed RAM is in that iBook. Seems RAM is a major contributor (or lack thereof) to performance with the more bloatware Tiger & Leopard.

So once again we see Apple arbitrarily decided for us what is the minimum system requirements and trying to restrict us from installing on slower machines, rather than just stating a minimum suggestion hardware configuration. I wonder in their testing, if Apple used max capacity RAM on these slower systems like the 800Mhz that have been officially cutoff.

so can i install using firewire, with my MBP and my dads iMac 800?

SeVeN said:

so can i install using firewire, with my MBP and my dads iMac 800?

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No you can't.

It has to be a PowerPC Mac.

FW disk mode from one of your other macs

Leopard on G4 iMac 800MHz

torn80 said:

By running well, does it run as fast as Tiger did in your opinion? I really want to upgrade my mom's G4 iMac (800 mhz), so I can use iChat to help her when she has "issues". But I don't necessarily want to slow her down too much. So any additional info would be appreciated.

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I did this exact thing! My parents' iMac G4 800MHz 768MB actually seems snappier than it did before (certainly for email/web/iChat/word processing/iPhotoiTunes, which is their entire use for it). This maybe because I did an erase and install (then copied my parents' files back from a SuperDuper clone I'd made of the hard drive before I tried the leopard install). Previously the iMac had been upgraded from 10.0 to.1 to .2 to .3, and may well have accumulated junk all over its hard drive.

Two things: for iChat screen sharing to work I had to get eCamm Powerboost, although I have no idea why Apple made iChat refuse to work without this - with Powerboost installed it video chats and screen shares fine.

Secondly, there is a sleep bug on the G4 800 iMac (GeForce2 MX, 32MB) - the display gets rainbow coloured vertical lines. (Solution: turn off computer, don't put it to sleep, make sure power management is set to never sleep)

The boot time is way quicker than it was before (and it was on Panther before). Screen sharing is just awesome - no more trying to explain what to do if the parents lose a file or whatever, just let me look for it from several hundred miles away

Eidorian said:

No you can't.

It has to be a PowerPC Mac.

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I feel really dumb. I tried to do the same thing with a 15" PowerBook that would not read my *cough burnt DVD of Leopard cough* so I target disked it from my Intel Mini and ran the installer, but it wouldn't boot after it finished. It all makes sense now.