OSX on original clamshell iBook??

[job]

I've got the opportunity to buy an original clamshell iBook (Blueberry) for just over $200.

It's got 320 MB RAM, an Airport card, and a 6GB HDD but no OS. Naturally, constrained by processor and bus speed would OS X 10.3 even be worth it?

Mind you, this machine would be purely used for word processing, email, and simple web browsing. I'd probably delete all programs other than Mail, TextEdit, Adium, Firefox, and MS Word. It'd be a stripped down machine and I'm planning on using haxies do disable the majority of the eye candy.

Do ya'll think this would work?

Or would Yellowdog Linux or Gentoo Linux + Open Office be a better OS solution for the 'Book?

 

[Linkjeniero]

I've got the opportunity to buy an original clamshell iBook (Blueberry) for just over $200.

It's got 320 MB RAM, an Airport card, and a 6GB HDD but no OS. Naturally, constrained by processor and bus speed would OS X 10.3 even be worth it?

Mind you, this machine would be purely used for word processing, email, and simple web browsing. I'd probably delete all programs other than Mail, TextEdit, Adium, Firefox, and MS Word. It'd be a stripped down machine and I'm planning on using haxies do disable the majority of the eye candy.

Do ya'll think this would work?

Or would Yellowdog Linux or Gentoo Linux + Open Office be a better OS solution for the 'Book?

Gentoo is known to squeeze every bit of power of a computer; if you run it with a light window manager (like windowmaker), it'll be really smooth (a friend of mine had a Thinkpad 550 MHz and 192M of RAM, and it ran like a charm... until he had enough of watching my PB and got himself an iBook, that is ). Buth with that said: is it worth it to get a mac and not run mac os x on it? If you will only use it for lightweight apps, as an emergency/occasional trip machine, then I say go for it; if not, you should aim a little higher. Try mac os x on it first though; there might not be need for Gentoo after all.

 

[Duff-Man]

Duff-Man says....I used to have a blueberry iBook 300 w/320mb ram....I ran OS X Public Beta, 10.0 and 10.1 on it before I upgraded to my Powerbook. I was doing basically what you look to be doing with it - surfing and word processing....it ran just fine for those things and 10.3.x will probably run even better. Just remember to do the custom install and strip it right down to the basics (languages, printer drivers etc) as drive space will be at a premium once you factor in the swap file space.....oh yeah!

 

[RacerX]

There shouldn't be any technical issues running 10.3 on that system... infact it should run just fine.



That having been said, the issue that may impact this from a user stand point is the display. The clamshell iBooks have a maximum resolution of 800x600 (which is below what I would normally consider the minimum for Mac OS X, 1024x768).

If you are not going to be running anything that needs the real-estate, then not only should 10.3 be fine, I would recommend 10.3 over previous versions because the 10.3 Finder works better on a smaller display like that one.

 

[Plymouthbreezer]

It's the HD space that will be the issue here.

 

[xsedrinam]

Just make sure the firmware update has been run on it.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86117
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