Installed Panther on a G3...ask me anything (almost)

Not for the faint of heart. The first install was on my son's machine, an iBook, which he had tweaked and hacked to pieces. It took over three hours to install from the disks, then more time trouble-shooting.

Big issues...disk two of the three disk set installs EVERY language on earth. You'll be able to run your Mac in Swahili, but it will cost you dearly in install time and storage space, with no option NOT to install. Plus, the installer seems to optimize and defrag after each component...again, terribly time consuming, especially with a big hd.

The finder crashed repeatedly after install, but it turned out to be a haxie called Silk. After removal it worked fine. Actually, my son said any haxies by Unsanity screwed it up. Best bet would be to remove any non-standard additions, at least temporarily.

Plus, give yourself room...Panter required an additional 1.3 gigs of hd space (mostly the foreign languages).

THE GOOD NEWS...

Once installed, Panther is blazing fast and wicked cool. Even on an old 700mhz G3 iBook, it is noticably, appreciably faster. And BEEEEEUUUITIFUL! The Expose feature alone is way cool, and the new Finder is sweet. So far...thumbs up for final product, thumbs down for unnecessarily time consuming install.

Next...install on a relatively clean G3 iMac DV with no hacks, then on an old PowerMac 9600 with a G4 processor upgrade.

I'm particularly interested in the install on the machine with the processor upgrade. It's unlikely I'll be getting a G5 any time soon, so I'm running one of the original 450 G4s, and I've been thinking about an upgrade card.

Somewhere along the line of dialog boxes during installation, you can customize the installation and tell it not to install the other languages.

Check out http://www.bombich.com/software/index.html for "delocalizer," which will remove all those languages if you did install them. . .Last I checked he had certified for 10.2, don't know about Panther support.

A clean install on my cube 450 took about 30 or 40 minutes.



P.S. Damn man, get rid of those haxies!!!!!!!!!!!! ;-) Your life will be better wo them!

"P.S. Damn man, get rid of those haxies!!!!!!!!!!!! ;-) Your life will be better wo them!"

LOL! My own machine is clean. I never mess with that crap. But, I have a teenage son who writes his own apps, and loves to tweak and mess with the system (oops...sorry, PC lovers...I know you think you can't tweak and mess with a Mac system. Another myth debunked). I leave mine alone, because even on a 400mhz G3, 10.2 runs like a dream. A slightly jumpy dream with full screen video, but a dream nonetheless. I will wait for my son's final report before putting it on my machine.

However, he is pretty slick with this stuff; I am surprized he would have missed the chance to opt-out of the language install. But hell, I'll try that delocalizer on my own machine, anyway. Thanks for the tip.