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iBook Clamshell Problem!

S

snarestud940

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 3, 2012
517
28
Hey Everyone,

I'm sure you all think I'm crazy, but I have a question. I purchased this old iBook clamshell about a year ago on eBay, jus to screw around with. I attached the specs here in pictures. Is there ANY way to get this a functional laptop of just going go the internet and fooling around with for fun? It currently does not connect to my wifi at my house. Anyone know?
 

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The wifi is an Airport card - the old type which is 802.11b
It will refuse to connect to a WPA or WPA2-protected wireless network, which is not supported on that Airport card.
You would be successful if you change the protection to WEP (but I wouldn't recommend doing that)
You COULD turn off protection, and that would work with the old Airport card (but I wouldn't recommend that, either :D )
If you must try to connect wirelessly with the Airport card, you could setup a network that uses the MAC address of the card, to selectively allow individual cards to connect - ignoring other cards.
Or, use a supported USB wifi adapter - but the USB 1.1 would restrict your speed, too.

Best effort for an internet connection on your clamshell would be ethernet.
 
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DeltaMac said:
The wifi is an Airport card - the old type which is 802.11b
It will refuse to connect to a WPA or WPA2-protected wireless network, which is not supported on that Airport card.
You would be successful if you change the protection to WEP (but I wouldn't recommend doing that)
You COULD turn off protection, and that would work with the old Airport card (but I wouldn't recommend that, either :D )
If you must try to connect wirelessly with the Airport card, you could setup a network that uses the MAC address of the card, to selectively allow individual cards to connect - ignoring other cards.
Or, use a supported USB wifi adapter - but the USB 1.1 would restrict your speed, too.

Best effort for an internet connection on your clamshell would be ethernet.
Click to expand...
I hear you. But I do not know what any of that means actually LOL. What I mean is, is there a way to put a modern Wi-Fi card in? Or is it not really worth doing that because the browser so old, etc.?
 
snarestud940 said:
I hear you. But I do not know what any of that means actually LOL. What I mean is, is there a way to put a modern Wi-Fi card in? Or is it not really worth doing that because the browser so old, etc.?
Click to expand...
Not easily at all. In addition, as you mentioned, the browser situation on Tiger is pretty bleak at this point, especially on a low-end G3. BTW, this question would be better posed to the PowerPC forum.
 
You need to change your wireless router security down to WPA then the iBook will be able to connect - I know this for sure as I installed Tiger on my 300Mhz iBook last week and it connected immediately.
 
Tiger doesn't support WPA, but leopard does.

Edit: This was true for my Quad G5 with AP Extreme. I don't know about the 802.11b. You may want to set up a second network for that, maybe shared from a more advanced mac for protection.
 
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Welcome to the PowerPC forum! We're a friendly group.

To answer your internet usage question, once you get either the wifi working or by using ethernet with it, TenFourFox works on Tiger, and @eyoungren's tweaks for the browser help it soar on older Macs especially - I've browsed pretty decently with a 300 MHz Power Mac G3 with 256 MB of RAM.

If you're looking to play some games with it, or just mess around with the system itself, check out the Macintosh Garden, they've got lots of cool old Applications you can use on your iBook. You can always use it to type out documents or listening to music as well.

Hope you enjoy using it! I love my iBook Clamshell. :)
 
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Eriamjh1138@DAN said:
Tiger doesn't support WPA, but leopard does.

Edit: This was true for my Quad G5 with AP Extreme. I don't know about the 802.11b. You may want to set up a second network for that, maybe shared from a more advanced mac for protection.
Click to expand...
Dronecatcher said:
So I imagined connecting my iBook running Tiger to the internet then??
Click to expand...
According to @Intell, the last two updates or so for Tiger gave access to WPA.

I've mentioned that it's Leopard only for WPA more than once in the past and Intell has been there to slap my hand each time. How I know this. :D
 
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Mac OS X 10.3.9 with the AirPort 4.2 update (and Tiger and above of course) will connect to WPA-protected networks. The old AirPort cards can be a bit hit-and-miss with modern routers, try setting up a network that is WPA (not WPA2), b/g 54mbps only (not n), and 2.4 GHz only (not 5 Ghz) - my clamshells work with those settings but routers do vary.
 
Great, that you've maxed-out RAM. An mSATA-upgrade would be awesome but tricky.
Your iBook should be able to run Tiger. Then you'll have the option to run webkit4Tiger or even TenFourFox, which is not as fast.
There's a tiny Edimax-WLAN-USB-stick and drivers/software for Tiger to get access to the latest WLAN-encryption, but speed is limited to USB1. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/granites-ibook-g3-clamshells.1747559/page-8#post-22145536
If you create a second partition for booting into OS9, the Edimax-WLAN-USB-stick won't work (Too bad: creating another partition will also erase your previous installation).
You may use this WLAN-SwissArmyKnife: "ASUS 3G MOBILE Wireless Router (WL-330N3G)", that connects to WLAN and shares it's connection via Ethernet. Works great both with Tiger and OS9. It's "mandatory" for being wireless with OS9 but optional for Tiger, and it's not limited to USB1-speed but uses your iBooks-LAN-speed.
Here's my my conclusion about iBook/OS9/WLAN (granted by the insight into PPC coming from this forum!):
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ions-for-mac-os9.1960993/page-2#post-22717102
 
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