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The point is, there needs to be some software that will allow one to move to a mac, but provides some sort of transitional workaround until something native is available.


try this* or this

if your still stuck in Mac OS 9, you can try this or even try to find this

you have a lot of options, open your eyes!

*yes it's owned by Microsoft, but only recently. VirtualPC is still the product i would recomend if you need to run windows Software on the mac. G5 support is still an issue, but version 7 (shipping soon) should fix that.

It looks like FWB's RealPC is a strong candidate. The management struggle accompanying the exposure of RealPC vaporous nature is also entertaining.

I can't find the technote that says what I say above, but I did find the following note from 6/22/99 here:

(B&W G3) Rev. 1 and Rev. 2 logic boards are similar. To differentiate, check the number printed on the CMD chip at location U1. The CMD chip on Rev. 1 logic boards is PCI646U2 and on Rev. 2 logic boards is 646U2-402.
Rev. 1 and Rev. 2 boards must be returned like for like. Note that when you return a Rev. 1 logic board, you may receive logic board 661-2104 or a logic board equivalent to 661-2194 as your replacement module."

Which is to say, if they're out of rev 1 boards, you'll get a rev 2 board. But they are not replacing rev 1 boards with rev 2 boards as a matter of course. Or I should say, they were not.

I found another snip here which was allegedly from a page at FWB (whose techinfo database is currently down.)

" There is a potential for data loss or data corruption with certain Ultra DMA hard drives when transfering data at the full ultra dma speed on the new Blue and White G3's. Western Digital AC420400D, Maxtor 90840D6, and the Quantum Bigfoot TX series. Symptoms include the inability to copy or open data files, launch applications, or even installing an OS. A quick test is to open a self mounting disk image file (a file created by Apple's DiskCopy 6.2 or above). If an error occurs while opening this file, you most likely have the problem."

3rd party IDE cards are cheap for PCs, but they are expensive for macs. The cheapest one I found was $89.99. You can buy the exact same SIIG card with a PC rom for $19.99. It's certainly not worth it today for a 350MHz G3 mac, not even powerful enough to play (say) a SVCD-resolution MPEG4 stream. It can only play DVDs because the video card has acceleration :P

Also, another poster (an AC) is claiming that this is a problem with MacOS 8.5.1. This is not the case. It is a problem with the hardware, not the OS; the workaround is in software, but it's not a very good workaround as you sacrifice performance. (I'm replying here just to get the info out, not picking on you in this issue.) There have been reports of it being fixed in MacOS X but that certainly was not my experience; actually, I got more corruption under X. (The corruption seems to occur when the CPU is running near maximum load.)

My G3 has an Adaptec 2930-MAC in it, so if I wanted to run SCSI drives, then that would be an adequate solution, but I wanted to run an IDE drive, which is much cheaper, and which I had lying around. Switching to another bus is not a solution to a stupid hardware bug.

I'm sorry I haven't succeeded in finding the apple technote itself. I've actually seen it before, but I have no idea how I found it. Apple has trashed the old TechInfo Library (TIL) - for an example of the results go to this page and click on "PowerBook G3 Series: Data Corruption When Reading Audio CDs (#24985)". It looks quite a bit like Apple folded TIL into the AppleCare documentation system, while removing any documents which they found unfavorable. This is just my paranoia, but I can't seem to find it. this page has a note where Apple claims that all G3 and newer pages are present, so either they're lying or I just cannot find the document. Of course, I could be lying about it existing in the first place, and you'll just have to make your own call.

It's a little confusing, especially if you're not on an OS X box, but this guy has built a software RAID setup. Essentially, all six disks are acting as one because he's used the OS X Disk Utility to set them up as one.

The problem with this is that OS X's Disk Utility doesn't support RAID 5 in software, at least not out of the box. So, you either have to stripe the six disks (lots of space, no redundancy) or mirror them (as much space as your smallest drive, full redundancy) . It looks like he went for the striping option, which is how he got over a terabyte. However, as it's been pointed out several times already, this is a bad idea because if one of those disks fails, his data is lost. And I seriously doubt he's backing this "disk" up...

What he should do (and quite possibly is doing for all I know, it's not detailed) is use something like Raid Toolkit to create a RAID 5 setup. Since RAID 5 uses both data striping and parity, his data is protected even if a disk gets hosed.

However, software-based RAID 5, at least in my understanding, isn't exactly a performance champ, so if he's doing a lot of reading and writing to that drive, he's probably better off getting a real RAID controller. However, this would make a killer media backup box.

The linux based software RAID HOW-TO is actually pretty informative for a general understanding of software RAID.

Cheers

...isn't how much water in a cloud...

....rather how much vapor is in FWB Software?

(Mods, be gentle...)

I agree, they can't pull too many tricks with this as a RealPC is returning. RealPC was as good as Virtual PC up until about release 3 or so of Virtual PC, with a little more work it could be again. This is probably why Microsoft is giving them grief; on the FWB home page they say "FWB has pushed back the release date of its Beta Version of PowerWindows (formerly SoftWindows) later this summer due to issues relating to Microsoft."

"Today's SlashDotFunQuiz is to predict the order in which, impact when, and years until these other Mac products get the axe: Media Player, MSN Messenger, Office, Outlook, and Virtual PC."

So, what are our alternatives?

Media Player: VLC, MPlayer for OS X

MSN Messenger: Proteus, Fire

Office: Apple Works, Keynote as Powerpoint Replacement, Open Office, AbiWord, Gnumeric

Outlook: Apple Mail.app, iCal, Evolution,

Virtual PC: Ya, well, maybe sometime RealPC will appear after they settle with Microsoft. But who uses that stuff anyway?

Last but not least, Internet Explorer: Safari, Camino, Mozilla and maybe soon again Omniweb, thanks to WebCore. (Yes, i left out Opera & iCab)

Okay, did i miss something? ;-)

This is awful narrow-minded of you. What about Linux (Debian, SuSE, Slackware, RedHat, Caldera...) , BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD), BeOS, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, NeXT, OS/2... (Don't expect me to remember them all).

Also, no one is forced to buy a new car. A technically-inclined person can go scavenge a junk yard and rebuild a classic. The laws work so that he can get by with older technology, too, with just a few restrictions.

A technically-inclined person could build an OS, too. (But you can't download a free copy of a car.) Sure, some Open Source OSes might be a couple of years behind MS OSes, but has MS really done that much since Win98? (Other than try to add stability... where it still doesn't compete with the BSDs and Linuxes.)

The car-road interface has been standardized well enough.... In software, however... only Microsoft...

The Computer-computer interface has standardized pretty well over the last few years, too. It's called TCP/IP (maybe you've heard of it). MS only has a monopoly only because we think that the have something that the others don't. We believe the MS marketing dept when they tell us that MS is better than anything else out there. What makes it "better"? Is it more reliable? More flexible? Cheaper? MS doesn't know what I want.

Look around, people. There are plenty of good options out there. If you think that MS is the only option, then you have been wearing the blinders that Bill has been handing out.

(Technologies such as RealPC (formerly Wabi) and VirtualPC free us from the bondage of the x86 architecture as well.)

I'd love to, but running their client inside of SoftWindows wouldn't be very efficient.

I agree that Seti isn't likely to succeed, but cracking ever-larger math puzzles has diminishing returns for me. I'd rather devote my cycles to something likely to help humankind.

Right now the only choice I've found is Popular Power, but their client runs in Java, so it's possibly even less efficient than a Windows emulator. Ugh. It uses less memory at least. Anyone else know a worthy cause that runs natively on MacOS?