imac g3

theparttime

ok. bear with me, i've never had a mac or messed with one too much. so i bought a used cheap imac g3 to mess around with. yes its ancient. it was practically free. the store wiped it, so no os. i have my os x discs. i put disc 1 in and it doesn't boot the disc on startup, and i try pressing c or command shift option delete but still no boot. am i doing something wrong? when exactly do i press c, do i hold it? all that comes up is a gray screen and a small folder with the mac face switching to a question mark.

thanks all.

Doc Holliday

Yes, you need to hold 'c' to boot from the disc. Which OS X version is it? Many G3 iMacs don't have DVD readers so make sure that your disc is readable by the mac.

HAKdragon

You're supposed to hold the button after the startup sound. Also, if you hold down Option (Alt) when the system starts up, it should give you a list of start up options, Hard Disk, Optical Drive, Network, etc. According to Wikipedia, DVD wasn't really an option on models until 2000.

Wikipedia wrote:

July 19, 2000 — iMac/iMac DV/iMac DV+/iMac DV SE. DV+ and DV SE models upgrade slot-loading CD-ROM to slot-loading DVD-ROM drive. 350 or 400 or 450 or 500 MHz processor, colors graphite (grey), ruby (red), snow (white), indigo (blue) and sage (green). 350 MHz model (Indigo) still lacked FireWire support.

Akilae729

You could try to boot from an external DVD drive

typhoon

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theparttime

for anyone who cared. guess i just had some faulty discs. borrowed my friends old discs and they booted fine. thanks all for your responses.

Satan.

theparttime wrote: »

for anyone who cared. guess i just had some faulty discs. borrowed my friends old discs and they booted fine. thanks all for your responses.

For the future, there is a Mac thread here just for such an occasion!

mcdermott

Satan Himself wrote: »

theparttime wrote: »

for anyone who cared. guess i just had some faulty discs. borrowed my friends old discs and they booted fine. thanks all for your responses.

For the future, there is a Mac thread here just for such an occasion!

People there are always too busy talking about their shiny new Intel Macs. Those of us in the PPC ghetto don't feel welcome there anymore.

Totally kidding, of course.

theparttime

ya i noticed that, but with macbook air as the title i wasn't sure whether i should post in there.

another question. i got this thing for free so i was excited to mess with a mac for the first time. i was also planning to possible dual boot some linux distro on it. but i'm learning and looking up stuff and i see that ubuntu and other distros require some ram. the imac g3 originally came with a measly 32mb! i really don't know much about installing linux. is there any linux distribution i can put on this thing for dual boot. its not worth it too upgrade the ram.

ben0207

Okay, some pointers.

That thing won't run Leopard, and won't really run Tiger, so you won't be getting a particulalrly good view as to what using a Mac is currently like (or has been for 4 years). But, it's a nice start. Welcome aboard



No need for a Linux, OS X is a proper UNIX already and Macports.com has all the packages you could possibly need.

theparttime

i know it won't run leopard. i'm not an idiot. i wanna put linux on it, just because i wanna. i know os x is a unix based operating system.

Gihgehls

I had ubuntu running on my beige g3 and it was such a pain in the ass and also totally pointless. You'll be compiling everything yourself and it will be slow as all get out. If I could have put OS X on it I would have. OS X is basically linux with the best GUI ever. Way better than any KDE or Gnome poop.

EggyToast

We have OS X 10.2 on an old 400mhz Powermac at work. It's slow, but it definitely runs and works and doesn't complain. It could probably run 10.3 but we're using it for legacy apps, so 10.2 it is.

I would also not suggest running Linux on it, unless you're talking about running Fluxbox or something on, say, Linux From Scratch or similar. I'd keep ubuntu away from it. Depends on what you want to end up using it for.

Gihgehls

If you're just looking for the challenge of installing linux on PPC, then that is definitely a good box to play around with. I just don't think it would be useful for much...