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My Crazy Sawtooth(Now Gigabit Ethernet) Project

bunnspecial

bunnspecial

macrumors G3
Original poster
May 3, 2014
8,376
6,511
Kentucky
I've been threatening this for a while, and had originally thought that I would actually need two separate computers to complete the project.

After some consideration, though, I realized that a Sawtooth would actually work perfectly, so out it came.

Basically, my plan is to install every PPC version of OS X on the computer. I've managed to put together disks for every version, so it's a matter of just taking the time to do all of the installs.

I'm doing this with two hard drives. The first is 80gb, of which 30gb is dedicated to Tiger and the rest is divided up for the various versions of OS X. Since I don't plan on doing serious work in older versions, they are quite content to be on small partitions. I steadily increased the partition size with increasing version numbers, with Public Beta, 10.0, and 10.1 getting 4gb each(remember that this was the size hard drive shipped in many of the computers these were intended to run on, and the install media is a single CD-ROM).

The second hard drive is nominally 60gb, with a dedicated 10gb OS 9 partition(I prefer having OS 9 in its own partition as a general rule, and especially with this set up, since I can select it from boot manager) and the remainder(about 46gb) for Leopard.

The graphics card in this system is actually the somewhat rare retail Mac edition Radeon 8500. Although this does not support core image, it gives outstanding performance in OS 9 and good performance in everything through Tiger. It's not even half bad in Leopard. The display is a 22" ADC Cinema, connected via an A1006 DVI-ADC adapter to the DVI out on the 8500. RAM, of course, is maxed at 2gb, mostly for Leopard's benefit.

I'm still in the(long) process of installing OS X. I actually don't have the 10.0 disks in hand yet(eyougren is very generously sending them to me), and 10.1 will have to wait until 10.0 arrives as the only disk I have for it is the free upgrade that Apple provided.

I've been playing with Public Beta this evening on my Yikes! and it is certainly an interesting-albeit unstable-OS...I'll just have to remember to hit the PMU reset should I desire to boot into it on the Sawtooth.
 

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bunnspecial said:
I've been threatening this for a while, and had originally thought that I would actually need two separate computers to complete the project.

After some consideration, though, I realized that a Sawtooth would actually work perfectly, so out it came.

Basically, my plan is to install every PPC version of OS X on the computer. I've managed to put together disks for every version, so it's a matter of just taking the time to do all of the installs.

I'm doing this with two hard drives. The first is 80gb, of which 30gb is dedicated to Tiger and the rest is divided up for the various versions of OS X. Since I don't plan on doing serious work in older versions, they are quite content to be on small partitions. I steadily increased the partition size with increasing version numbers, with Public Beta, 10.0, and 10.1 getting 4gb each(remember that this was the size hard drive shipped in many of the computers these were intended to run on, and the install media is a single CD-ROM).

The second hard drive is nominally 60gb, with a dedicated 10gb OS 9 partition(I prefer having OS 9 in its own partition as a general rule, and especially with this set up, since I can select it from boot manager) and the remainder(about 46gb) for Leopard.

The graphics card in this system is actually the somewhat rare retail Mac edition Radeon 8500. Although this does not support core image, it gives outstanding performance in OS 9 and good performance in everything through Tiger. It's not even half bad in Leopard. The display is a 22" ADC Cinema, connected via an A1006 DVI-ADC adapter to the DVI out on the 8500. RAM, of course, is maxed at 2gb, mostly for Leopard's benefit.

I'm still in the(long) process of installing OS X. I actually don't have the 10.0 disks in hand yet(eyougren is very generously sending them to me), and 10.1 will have to wait until 10.0 arrives as the only disk I have for it is the free upgrade that Apple provided.

I've been playing with Public Beta this evening on my Yikes! and it is certainly an interesting-albeit unstable-OS...I'll just have to remember to hit the PMU reset should I desire to boot into it on the Sawtooth.
Click to expand...

I installed the public beta on my iMac G3, and it was quite interesting, as you said
 
That mac radeon 8500 is very very rare. As far as I know, it only ever came on the xserve g4 if you ordered it as a workstation with agp card.
 
Surrat said:
That mac radeon 8500 is very very rare. As far as I know, it only ever came on the xserve g4 if you ordered it as a workstation with agp card.
Click to expand...

I think mine was the retail card. It actually came in an Ebay along with a GEForce 4Ti and a couple of Mac games(I think the previous owner was probably a gamer, hence the high-end cards and the games to go with them). It has a white DVI port and blue VGA port-not the black ports that were on most OEM/BTO Apple cards of the era.

In any case, I'll benchmark it for you and add it to the ongoing thread :)
 
I installed all supported versions of OS X on an iMac G4 15" 800MHz just 2 weeks ago: 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5.

It's really awesome to see how the OS changed over the years, and how performance increased from 10.1-10.2 to 10.3 and finally 10.4. The first versions are actually slower on the same hardware than the newer ones.
I also installed the Public Beta on my G4 Cube a while ago (I don't have that machine anymore) and 10.0 on my iBook G3. What a strange OS... :D
 
Heh this is awesome :) I once saw some one on eBay selling a G3 BW that had every OS it could run installed every thing from mac OS 8.5 to OS X 10.4 (altho it did not have any of the OS X DP1-4 betas installed) in the Pic I installed OS X DP3 on my sawtooth witch was the first version of OS X to have the aqua interface.
 

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Thanks for the reminder...now I'm going to have to track down the DPs. I also should find a copy of Rhapsody(OS X server 1.0)

Btw, playing around with public beta, it's interesting to see the hold-overs from OS 9-such as shut-down being integrated into the "special" menu. At the same time, there were some features that showed up in later versions OS X-such as not showing mounted hard drives on the desktop( although you can turn this on in later versions of OS X, while I see no way to do it in DP).

BTW, I actually sort of like some features of these early versions of OSX that disappeared after 10.3. I like that the commonly used setting in System Preferences appear across the top...
 
bunnspecial said:
Thanks for the reminder...now I'm going to have to track down the DPs. I also should find a copy of Rhapsody(OS X server 1.0)

Btw, playing around with public beta, it's interesting to see the hold-overs from OS 9-such as shut-down being integrated into the "special" menu. At the same time, there were some features that showed up in later versions OS X-such as not showing mounted hard drives on the desktop( although you can turn this on in later versions of OS X, while I see no way to do it in DP).

BTW, I actually sort of like some features of these early versions of OSX that disappeared after 10.3. I like that the commonly used setting in System Preferences appear across the top...
Click to expand...

Here is where I get most of my downloads: https://winworldpc.com/product/mac-os-x
 
Why the PMU reset needed?

thanks and its a super cool project

bunnspecial said:
I've been threatening this for a while, and had originally thought that I would actually need two separate computers to complete the project.

After some consideration, though, I realized that a Sawtooth would actually work perfectly, so out it came.

Basically, my plan is to install every PPC version of OS X on the computer. I've managed to put together disks for every version, so it's a matter of just taking the time to do all of the installs.

I'm doing this with two hard drives. The first is 80gb, of which 30gb is dedicated to Tiger and the rest is divided up for the various versions of OS X. Since I don't plan on doing serious work in older versions, they are quite content to be on small partitions. I steadily increased the partition size with increasing version numbers, with Public Beta, 10.0, and 10.1 getting 4gb each(remember that this was the size hard drive shipped in many of the computers these were intended to run on, and the install media is a single CD-ROM).

The second hard drive is nominally 60gb, with a dedicated 10gb OS 9 partition(I prefer having OS 9 in its own partition as a general rule, and especially with this set up, since I can select it from boot manager) and the remainder(about 46gb) for Leopard.

The graphics card in this system is actually the somewhat rare retail Mac edition Radeon 8500. Although this does not support core image, it gives outstanding performance in OS 9 and good performance in everything through Tiger. It's not even half bad in Leopard. The display is a 22" ADC Cinema, connected via an A1006 DVI-ADC adapter to the DVI out on the 8500. RAM, of course, is maxed at 2gb, mostly for Leopard's benefit.

I'm still in the(long) process of installing OS X. I actually don't have the 10.0 disks in hand yet(eyougren is very generously sending them to me), and 10.1 will have to wait until 10.0 arrives as the only disk I have for it is the free upgrade that Apple provided.

I've been playing with Public Beta this evening on my Yikes! and it is certainly an interesting-albeit unstable-OS...I'll just have to remember to hit the PMU reset should I desire to boot into it on the Sawtooth.
Click to expand...
 
bunnspecial said:
Basically, my plan is to install every PPC version of OS X on the computer. I've managed to put together disks for every version, so it's a matter of just taking the time to do all of the installs.
Click to expand...

I did just that a while back with one of my Pismos - all the clients and all the server versions. I salvaged a 160GB HDD from my 12" PB, which now sports an SSD. Of course, the Pismo will not run Leopard as I am not fortunate to have one with the rare G4 upgrade, so I compensated with an OS9 install instead.

It took two goes because although the IDE controller will see large hard drives, there are still issues with booting past 128GB.

Wikipedia is a good start. That tells you how much room a typical install of each version takes. That made partitioning before installation easier to calculate.
 
bunnspecial said:
I've been threatening this for a while, and had originally thought that I would actually need two separate computers to complete the project.

After some consideration, though, I realized that a Sawtooth would actually work perfectly, so out it came.

Basically, my plan is to install every PPC version of OS X on the computer. I've managed to put together disks for every version, so it's a matter of just taking the time to do all of the installs.

I'm doing this with two hard drives. The first is 80gb, of which 30gb is dedicated to Tiger and the rest is divided up for the various versions of OS X. Since I don't plan on doing serious work in older versions, they are quite content to be on small partitions. I steadily increased the partition size with increasing version numbers, with Public Beta, 10.0, and 10.1 getting 4gb each(remember that this was the size hard drive shipped in many of the computers these were intended to run on, and the install media is a single CD-ROM).

The second hard drive is nominally 60gb, with a dedicated 10gb OS 9 partition(I prefer having OS 9 in its own partition as a general rule, and especially with this set up, since I can select it from boot manager) and the remainder(about 46gb) for Leopard.

The graphics card in this system is actually the somewhat rare retail Mac edition Radeon 8500. Although this does not support core image, it gives outstanding performance in OS 9 and good performance in everything through Tiger. It's not even half bad in Leopard. The display is a 22" ADC Cinema, connected via an A1006 DVI-ADC adapter to the DVI out on the 8500. RAM, of course, is maxed at 2gb, mostly for Leopard's benefit.

I'm still in the(long) process of installing OS X. I actually don't have the 10.0 disks in hand yet(eyougren is very generously sending them to me), and 10.1 will have to wait until 10.0 arrives as the only disk I have for it is the free upgrade that Apple provided.

I've been playing with Public Beta this evening on my Yikes! and it is certainly an interesting-albeit unstable-OS...I'll just have to remember to hit the PMU reset should I desire to boot into it on the Sawtooth.
Click to expand...

An interesting project that I've thought about doing on my 500 MHz BTO maxed-out Sawtooth. It should be able to take all versions of OS X from the Public Beta even up to Leopard with LeopardAssist.

Unfortunately I'm still missing a lot of retail install disks which complicates things a little bit.
 
redheeler said:
An interesting project that I've thought about doing on my 500 MHz BTO maxed-out Sawtooth. It should be able to take all versions of OS X from the Public Beta even up to Leopard with LeopardAssist.

Unfortunately I'm still missing a lot of retail install disks which complicates things a little bit.
Click to expand...

I really would like to throw a faster processor in my Sawtooth, although I don't know what I would use. If I'm doing my math right, a 533mhz out of a DA would run at 400mhz in a Sawtooth. A low-spec Quicksilver processor like a 733 wouldn't be bad since that would give me 550mhz. I gave away all my working 733s, though
 
bunnspecial said:
I really would like to throw a faster processor in my Sawtooth, although I don't know what I would use. If I'm doing my math right, a 533mhz out of a DA would run at 400mhz in a Sawtooth. A low-spec Quicksilver processor like a 733 wouldn't be bad since that would give me 550mhz. I gave away all my working 733s, though
Click to expand...

How do you figure that?
 
LightBulbFun said:
Heh this is awesome :) I once saw some one on eBay selling a G3 BW that had every OS it could run installed every thing from mac OS 8.5 to OS X 10.4 (altho it did not have any of the OS X DP1-4 betas installed) in the Pic I installed OS X DP3 on my sawtooth witch was the first version of OS X to have the aqua interface.
Click to expand...

I did that with my B&W G3 until the hard drive died. Similarly, no DPs, but yes the Public Beta.

For my vintage machines, I tend to go for two OSes:
1. The original hard drive image it shipped with.
2. The latest OS it is capable of booting (sometimes "latest official," sometimes "latest with hacks.")

For machines with sufficient hard drive capacity (usually upgraded hard drives,) I try to go for a partition for each OS it is capable of running.
 
Just a word of warning From experience a 7455 CPU upgrade in a sawtooth prevents OS X DPs from booting they hang at the BootX loading part (OS X public beta will still boot but reports the CPU as a G3 LOL) and that some GPU upgrades can prevent them from booting as well So I Suggest you stick with the stock Rage 128 or something
 
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redheeler said:
Wouldn't it be better to use a Gigabit Ethernet model for this project anyway? Those should be able to run the Public Beta.
Click to expand...

A GigE is not a bad idea...mine is a dual 500mhz. If I go with the GigE, I'd like to find another GEForce 4 Ti to use in it,, since the only one I have now is dead(I seem to have a bad track record with that card). If nothing else, I know at least a 4MX is doable with Leopard(I've run Leopard on a Rage 128, and it's not an experience I want to repeat).

Just a word of warning From experience a 7455 CPU upgrade in a sawtooth prevents OS X DPs from booting they hang at the BootX loading part (OS X public beta will still boot but reports the CPU as a G3 LOL) and that some GPU upgrades can prevent them from booting as well So I Suggest you stick with the stock Rage 128 or something
Click to expand...

Thanks for the word of warning on it...I'll probably just stick with the stock CPU for now, or perhaps a faster 7400 if I can find one.

As I said, I dread trying to run Leopard with a Rage 128-I haven't installed Public Beta yet, but would hope that it would do okay with the 8500. I do have the driver disk for it, so if nothing else perhaps I should put a Rage 128 in for the install work and put the 8500 back in after I've run the drivers.

Since I'm using this with a Cinema display, though, having a card with DVI out makes life easy(I don't think there's a way to connect a Cinema display to a VGA output). Of course, if I switched over to the GigE, I could plug the 22" Cinema directly into Rage 128 and dispense with the A1006. A Rage 128 will drive the 22", although grudgingly.
 
That mystical G4/400 I always speak of at work that ran Leopard in a full on production roll for five years – two Rage 128 cards. One AGP and one PCI.

Just saying. :D
 
Okay, the "Crazy Sawtooth Project" has now become my "Crazy Gigabit Ethernet" project-Rage 128 and all.

I think my Sawtooth has issues, as I had problems installing a couple of the versions of OS X. The GigE just saves me a lot of headaches.

I'll put either a Radeon 9000 or GeForce4 MX in it when I everything set up.
 
I actually got a bit of a pleasant surprise when I ran AHT on the GigE...I thought it had a Rage 128 in it, but was wrong.

It seems as thought it has a GEForce 2MX Twin-View.

I'm pretty sure that this is the card that was in the computer when I got it-I don't think I would have knowingly put this card in the system. That's doubly true since I didn't even know I had one of these!

In any case, I'm installing Leopard now. I had run my cleaning CD 4 times to get it to boot off the Leopard installer disk(it is a retail pressed disk, if anyone is wondering). I find that often times these old DVD drives will read a DL DVD fine(or at least a pressed one-burned are hit-or-miss) but getting the computer to boot off one can be like pulling teeth. If it weren't for the fact that I'm against piracy on principle, I'd download the slimmed-down PPC-only Leopard version that's circulating the web and will fit on a single layer DVD just to avoid fighting this.
 
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