Can OS10.3 be installed in a 'beige' PowerMac G3?

[Mr_Ed]

Just curious. I would like to upgrade the OS on my niece's old G3 (233 MHz) from the OS 8.6 she's still running. I have it installed on my old 400 MHz G3 Powerbook and I don't think those systems are that different. I'm not too worried about performance since they are not doing enything too demanding. At some point I will help them upgrade to a newer system but that's not an option right now.

Thanks in advance for your input.

 

[Sun Baked]

The 10.3 installer disc will probably only support machines with built-in USB, you may need one of the installation hacks to get it on the non-USB machine.

 

[robbieduncan]

I think that these machines were supported officially in earlier versions of OSX, but not 10.3. With a little help from XPostFacto you could probably get it to work. You probably want to stuff as much RAM in there as it'll take though.

 

[Mr_Ed]

Thanks for the info. I don't want to mess with any other hacks. I just wish it was easier to find information about supported systems in the older versions of the OS. It doesn't have to be Panther, but I think pretty much anything 'X' is an improvement over what is there now.

I did find a PDF file from Apple (ReadBeforeYouInstall10.2.pdf) which does not list a 'built-in USB' requirement (unlike Panther). There is also a paragraph inside that says:

For example, if you have a Power Macintosh G3 (Beige) computer with an Apple Ultra Wide SCSI PCI card, you should update the firmware for the card using the Mac OS X SCSI Card Updater available on the Apple Software Updates Web site.

I might just give that (10.2) a try since I have all of them (10.1-10.3).

 

[cluthz]

The beige runs 10.2 fine, but not 10.3.

It is possible to install 10.3 on it with xpostfacto, but the videocard in the beige does only supports 256 colors in 10.3....
So if you are going to install 10.3 on your beige, get a new videocard

Stick 10.2 on your beige and load up with RAM..