On Dec 27, 2008, at 9:21 PM, Darin Sheriff wrote: > Hello everyone, > > I have recently had the good fortune to acquire a beige powermac G3 > and plan on putting os 9.2 on it and also os 10.2 Jaguar. I am also > looking for a way to make it wireless and I have seen some wireless > PCI cards on ebay that are airport extreme compatible. Does anyone > know if these cards work with a beige powermac? >
It will be hard to find any modern card that works with OS 9. Most modern cards can be tweaked to work with OS X, but having a current version of OS X helps, so if you're looking for a cheap card, you better install 10.4.11 on this Beige using XPostFacto 4. You may be able to find an 802.11b card that works in both OS 9 & OS X Jaguar, but I'm not aware what that card is? The Beige is a very difficult Mac for OS X. You should read the XPostFacto forums before installing. You've got a 1st 8 GB limitation on OS X native booting installations, but you can install onto larger partitions outside the 1st 8 GB by using an XPF "helper disk" to boot with. A good strategy for the Beige is to get a PCI Firewire 400 card and boot from external Firewire HDs. This eliminates the 1st 8 GB issue and the 128GB total HD size limitation, plus gets you faster HD access at a price cheaper than a Mac bootable ATA card that supports larger than 128GB HDs. You'll need a Radeon PCI card so that you can enable Quartz Extreme with PCI Extreme 3.1. Without the Radeon, it will struggle with simple graphics tasks like fast scrolling of complex webpages. If you're installing OS X beyond Jaguar you should subscribe and post questions to the Unsupported OS X list rather than G3-5 list which is for supported Macs and software. Honestly, the Beige is very difficult. Unless you have time to tinker I'd recommend getting any AGP G4 instead. There are so many idiosyncrasies of the Beige to remember, and they all are time consuming and frustrating. As for the PCI Airport card, I use a NetGear WN311B which is a cheap, modern 802.11n card. It needs a very slight "tweak" to get it recognized as "Airport", but it works identically as a native Airport card. The tweak I used was called "bcm43xx_enabler_0.5.1pre.sh.zip" which you can download it on the web. I don't think any 802.11n cards will work with anything less than Tiger 10.4? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
