Tiger installation with XPostFacto - performance issues?

[Mayari]

I have a Blueberry clamshell that I recently installed Tiger on using XPostFacto. It's slow, but not unbearable. Although I wonder if the OS performance is affected by the fact that it runs with XPostFacto. I remember reading somewhere about how Tiger runs very well on older Macs, especially if they're not running any hacks. (I might have read it here, but I can't seem to find a corresponding thread)

Anyway, after installation with xpf, does OS X run on an unsupported machine like it would on a supported one? Or does the hack have to run in the background every time? Are there any performance issues? Before anyone asks, my clamshell is 300 MHz non-Firewire, with the ram maxed out at 576 MB. Spotlight and Dashboard are disabled, extra languages and architectures removed with Monolingual, and I usually run ShadowKiller on startup. Could I speed things up even more if I could somehow get Tiger installed normally and not with a hack?

 

[DrakkenWar]

Tiger is a No-Go native.

I really have no experience with XpostFacto. Read a ton about it, had a few occasions where I thought I would use it and yet never really got around to it.
As far as running 10.4 natively on your iBook? Short answer? Not going to happen.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1514

- As you can read here, where your iBook pwns the farm is the req for built-in FireWire. So that answers that question. Here's a follow up link for verification:

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/ibook/specs/ibook.html

While it sounds to me that you have done all that you can to squeeze some more life out of what is truly a really cool laptop, you might want to consider 10.3 on it. I know Panther is OLD news to a lot of people and it will really limit what you can do. The alternative to that is a thread that is being talked about currently. An iBook G4 owner is looking at linux possibilities. I have added some good information to that avenue as well.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1384288/

I can understand wanting to stay with OSX whenever you can, unless you are willing/have the means to install 9.2.2 on your iBook and find use for it in that way, linux really might be your best option.

 

[tayloralmond]

XPostFacto doesn't run in the background. In your case, all XPostFacto does is trick the Tiger disk into allowing the 10.4 install. In other instances, XPostFacto will install other addons to allow an operating system to run on unsupported architecture (such as installing OS X on an old PowerPC 603 processor). In my opinion, unless you absolutely NEED Tiger, I'd recommend installing 10.2 Jaguar. Jaguar only requires 128MB of RAM and a 233MHz processor. The reason I don't recommend 10.3 Panther is because Jaguar is equally outdated because neither has an up to date web browser and both run essentially the same software because their release dates are so close together (10.2 released in 2002, 10.3 released in 2003).

EDIT: In regards to optimizations, you've done a pretty good job of optimizing already. The only other things I can recommend are disable the "genie" minimizing effect as well as any dock animations, change color settings to "thousands" instead of "millions," and make sure you keep your desktop/dock clear of unneeded icons. In case you want to take it a step further, here's a tutorial I wrote that might help--->Link.

 

[Mayari]

Thanks for all the suggestions!

In regards to optimizations, you've done a pretty good job of optimizing already. The only other things I can recommend are disable the "genie" minimizing effect as well as any dock animations, change color settings to "thousands" instead of "millions," and make sure you keep your desktop/dock clear of unneeded icons. In case you want to take it a step further, here's a tutorial I wrote that might help--->Link.

I've already had the "genie" effect and dock animations disabled, and the display set to thousands of colors (just forgot to mention it before). I just looked at the tutorial, and I think I'll check out Onyx.

While it sounds to me that you have done all that you can to squeeze some more life out of what is truly a really cool laptop, you might want to consider 10.3 on it. I know Panther is OLD news to a lot of people and it will really limit what you can do.

I did consider installing Jaguar or Panther over Tiger, although I'd read some conflicting information about whether Tiger ran better over Panther in most cases. Logically speaking, though, I'm sure Jaguar or Panther would work better simply due to lower processor and memory requirements. I've already installed OS 9.2.2 (my clamshell is set to dual-boot OS 9 and OS X) and it runs beautifully. I actually run most of my apps on this clamshell in OS 9 (mostly classic games and emulators, and internet using Classilla) and after installing A-Dock, it's very similar to OS X.

The only reason I have OS X installed is to listen to my iTunes library from my MBP - since I have a massive 120+ GB library, the clamshell obviously can't access it locally, and iTunes 10 library sharing doesn't work with iTunes 8. So I use SSH tunneling with MacFUSE and SSHfs to mount my MBP's hard drive as a network drive, and play my library remotely from there. I'd gladly run Jaguar or Panther if these apps would work on them - I think they're Tiger-only.

 

[Intell]

If you're running Tiger on that machine, you can put iTunes 9.1 on it. This is the last version the unofficialy supports G3's. iTunes 9.2 doesn't an requires a G4. Some things like iTunes Extras won't work on a G3, but everything else does. You'll have to use Pacifist to install it as the iTunes installer will not allow it to be installed in a G3 machine. With iTunes 9.1, you'll be able to access a shared iTunes library on a local network and the iTunes Music Store.

I run iTunes 9.1 on Tiger on my 350Mhz G3 iMac with 512Mb of ram. While no speed deamon, it makes an excellent music machine. It can even do light web broswing and other tasks like Excel and Word stuff.

 

[blesscheese]

I have a Blueberry clamshell that I recently installed Tiger on using XPostFacto. It's slow, but not unbearable. Although I wonder if the OS performance is affected by the fact that it runs with XPostFacto. I remember reading somewhere about how Tiger runs very well on older Macs, especially if they're not running any hacks. (I might have read it here, but I can't seem to find a corresponding thread)

Anyway, after installation with xpf, does OS X run on an unsupported machine like it would on a supported one? Or does the hack have to run in the background every time? Are there any performance issues? Before anyone asks, my clamshell is 300 MHz non-Firewire, with the ram maxed out at 576 MB. Spotlight and Dashboard are disabled, extra languages and architectures removed with Monolingual, and I usually run ShadowKiller on startup. Could I speed things up even more if I could somehow get Tiger installed normally and not with a hack?

Hey,
Glad to hear you are still using your old clamshell! I have run XPostFacto and Tiger on a number of old machines, and still run it on my old Lombard, which is the same vintage as your iBook.

The limitations of running Tiger on your clamshell will be a) RAM (which you have mitigated by having 576MB already, Tiger requires 256MB *minimum*, and really, 1GB is the sweetspot), and b) Bus speed. Your clamshell has (iirc) a 66MHz bus (like my Lombard). By way of comparison, soon afterwards, the PowerBook Pismo had a 100MHz bus, and then the same generation PowerMac G4 (Sawtooth) had a 133MHz bus. In other words, it could move twice as much data per second as our older models.

That being said, if you are just simply doing simple tasks, like playing iTunes, or using Word, or light surfing/email, you shouldn't notice any problems. As mentioned, XPostFacto is simply a hack to trick the Tiger Installer to install on unsupported hardware, once it has been installed, XPostFacto never runs again.

Where you will notice problems is when you are trying to move lots of data at once, like, ripping CDs to iTunes, or doing a couple of tasks at once (let alone many tasks at once).

As others pointed out, it sounds like you have optimized things as best as you can. This might be as good as it gets. The only other upgrade I could think of would be (are you handy with a screwdriver? not for the feint of heart with an iBook) upgrading the internal drive to an OWC SSD for older IDE interfaces.

Oh, and I don't think there is any point downgrading to Panther or Jaguar. Tiger lets you run iTunes up to about v9 or so, and I always found Tiger seemed to run faster than Panther or Jaguar. My Lombard has been rock-solid and running Tiger for over 5 or 6 years now, without a problem. At this point, I only really use it to run Quicken 2005.

I'd be interested in hearing more about your SSH tunneling sometime, when you get a chance. Sounds like a great way to use the old hardware. Not to go on much longer, but I'm always amazed that 10 year old (well, actually, my Lombard will be 13 in September!) hardware not only runs, but is still fulfilling a useful purpose!