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Just bought a G4 Ibook off ebay

Garyed055

Garyed055

macrumors 6502
Original poster
The specs say basically OSX only specifically 10.3 to 10.5 but is it possible to load OS9 alone?

Gary
 
Garyed055 said:
The specs say basically OSX only specifically 10.3 to 10.5 but is it possible to load OS9 alone?

Gary
Click to expand...

Which model iBook G4 is it? I believe the forum members at MacOS9Lives.com got OS9 running on many of the G4 iBook models. Take a look through their forums for the Unsupported Mac OS 9 information, compatibility and download links.
 
Garyed055 said:
The specs say basically OSX only specifically 10.3 to 10.5 but is it possible to load OS9 alone?

Gary
Click to expand...
Something weird

As you know when you shut these units they are supposed to go into sleep mode. but when I close this one it keeps going in and out of sleep mode. I've never seen this???

Gary
 
Garyed055 said:
The specs say basically OSX only specifically 10.3 to 10.5 but is it possible to load OS9 alone?

Gary
Click to expand...
The iBook G4 with Radeon 9200 GFX works pretty well, the ones with Radeon 9550 GFX don't work very well.

The early and late 2004 iBooks have the Radeon 9200 Graphics, the logicboard layout and devices were really still designed to work with OS 9. Things like the tracpad are ADB rather than USB.

That having been said, OS 9 is not perfect on the 2004 models, they don't support sleep, tho we have figured out how to enable the NAP feature of the 7447a CPU, we still haven't found a way to enable the reduced CPU speed feature, and some other Power Manger features needed for sleep.

Of course USB only works at 1.1 speeds because there never were any drivers for USB 2 in the classic Mac OS. Also, Airport Extreme doesn't work, again there was never any driver support.

I made some drivers for the 9200 Graphics that enable the full feature set for OS 9 graphics acceleration, they are not perfect, but they work.

As for the Mid-2005 iBook G4's with the Radeon 9550, they don't have very good Tracpad support, as the use USB rather than ADB, and they are not a standard USB HID pointer device. They trac really slow, two or three swipes to move across the screen. They basically only work in Open Firmware mode that uses a strange ADB emulation layer. If you boot with OPT to get the boot chooser, you will see the the trapped tracs the same, very slow. You have to remove the USB Device Extension for the Tracpad to work at all under OS 9, there is a conflict because Apple choose to use a non-standard USB Tracpad, rather than a standard USB HID pointer device.

I did make a basic Native Device Driver ('NDRV') for the Radeon 9550, that allows for switching the screen resolution and bit depth, however it doesn't support any sort of Graphics acceleration. I was able to make the 9200 work because ATI/AMD made that GPU based on the older Redeon 8500 that had full OS 9 support. The 9550 is based on the Redeon 9600 and that never had OS 9 support for graphics acceleration. The only way to make GA support for the 9550 would be to port the old linux Radeon driver to OS 9, and well as Mesa 3D and completely replace the Apple Graphics stack with Mesa.

It could be done, but it's not very likely to ever happen, because we don't have a new enough C compiler for OS 9 to compile the needed Mesa and it's dependency. It would also just be a lot of work for very little return, and I don't think we could ever get RAVE to work, only OpenGL.

A little less work would be to write a Quickdraw driver for acceleration of the 2D desktop on the 9550, as there is some work done on that for Mac OS Emulators. Still not very likely to happen, but a lot more reasonable and doable than porting 3D drivers.

As far as USB 2, Sleep, and Airport Extreme, the same apply to the Mid-2005 as to the 2004 models.
 
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Just don't expect to be browsing modern web pages under OS 9, or using modern rich email clients. That's the deal breaker for me, I can't use and OS for anything worthwhile if I can't browse the web or do email.

Most of the diehard OS 9 users are doing audio work or working with old typesetting software. I'm sure a modern computer could do that stuff a lot faster and better, but people have a lot invested in learning how to do these things in software that runs under OS 9. OS 9 has it's limitations, but it's a really low overhead OS that doesn't use a lot of hardware abstraction layers. I assume in professional audio work abstraction layers and preemptive multi-tasking can create unwanted or un-needed noise.

Also, software seats can be expensive, and take a long time to learn to use correctly.

I just like to hack the OS itself, I really don't use OS 9 for anything, tho I would if I could run modern web clients. Porting Webkit to OS 9 is on my bucket list, but limitations in Ram, CPU speed and Virtual Memory are not very easy to overcome.

OS 9 is limited to 1.5G of memory, real or virtual, and I've seen a lot of modern web pages that need 350-500MB. Also the speed of the CPU is a factor, webpages like CNN.com have a lot of code using a lot of CPU time.

I had a old ARM Chromebook that was 32bit dual core 1.6Ghz, with 2 GB of RAM, and it was usable, tho 40% of one of the cores was being used to manage the virtual memory task.

So Powermacs with multi core 32bit CPUs could still handle modern web pages with Webkit if we did a lot of hacking to expand the Virtual memory limitations of OS 9.
 
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Garyed055 said:
Yes it helped me a lot. The bumpers at the top right and left of the screen were gone when I bought it and after reading that sleep can be interrupted by contact with the keyboard I replaced the bumpers and problem solved

thank you

Gary
Click to expand...

Well done Gary. Mystery solved! 😎
 
Odd happening Number 2. seeing as this one has only 512k ram I wanted to take a step back from leopard to tiger but the version of Tiger I have didn't see the touchpad or mouse and the built in WIFI wouldn't connect

Gary
 
Garyed055 said:
Odd happening Number 2. seeing as this one has only 512k ram I wanted to take a step back from leopard to tiger but the version of Tiger I have didn't see the touchpad or mouse and the built in WIFI wouldn't connect

Gary
Click to expand...

Is it a retail version of Tiger or a grey disk? The grey disks will be machine specific and perhaps missing drivers?
 
Got the OS thing worked out. 512k ram its much faster with 10.4.11 loaded all updates and installed Photoshop, MS Word 98, and ILife 6
ibook2.jpg
 
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I love how much great old software you can find for free for old Macs. There is actually good powerful stuff out there that's just 'abandonware'. I find myself thinking things like why is it so hard to find a half decent, simple photo editor for Mojave when you can take your pick of freeware for PPC.
 
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