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Mac OS X Panther On A 25MHz Centris 650

Posted by timothy on from the quaalude-vending-machine dept.

Currawong writes "danamania, well known for making the most of 68k Macs, has done the ultimate, and installed Mac OS X Panther on an old Centris with 68MB RAM, a 25MHz 68040 and 4GB drive - an early 90's machine with about the same power as a NeXT cube. To achieve this, she's had to run it under PearPC on Debian, resulting in a severe performance hit, as generic emulation runs "about 500 times slower" according to the developers. On this approximately 0.05MHz G3 speed emulator, the boot screen has taken 1.5 hours to appear, and the ETA for full boot is almost exactly 1 week! Regular updates are being posted as each milestone in the boot process is reached."

5 of 499 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Very simple question... by Chrispy1000000+the+2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because it was there?

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  2. Who cares? by Radak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why does Slashdot keep covering people who waste time installing PearPC and OSX on various already-incredibly-slow pieces of aging hardware? Is Slashdot really this hard up for quality story material?

    Getting a web server to run on an Atari 800 is kind of cool. Modding a Roomba to deliver your Dr Pepper is nifty. Getting OSX to run on the slowest piece of hardware you can get Linux to run on is tired and boring.

    Don't make me start reading CNN for my news.

    1. Re:Who cares? by cgenman · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because it's neat?

      In many ways getting OSX to run on an 040 based Macintosh is like playing the Matrix on a Zoetrope... Utterly pointless but damned nifty. Sure you had to create a connected series of bluetooth LCD monitors with alternating frames playing back from a 1GB CF drive, but don't it beat all that it works. And that the old macintosh is running the new mac software with a one-week boot time is even cooler and more interesting.

      If you want news, go to the BBC. If you want fanatical fandom with no grounding in reality... go to Fox. If you want nifty stuff like discussing the colors of glowsticks in 30 year old movies, you're in the right spot.

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  3. Wow. by bratmobile · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's the stupidest thing I've read all day long. And I've been reading POLITICS all day long.

  4. Re:IT SEEMS by dougmc · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Imagine trying to get WinXP running via an emulator on a similar-spec XT machine...
    To be fair, the Centris is much faster than an IBM XT and has much more memory.

    A more accurate comparison would be to run XP on a 486/25 with 64 MB of ram. Of course, XP will probably refuse to run on a 486 at all, so you'll need a 686 emulator running on the 486, and you'll need at least 128 MB of ram (so the emulator will have to use virtual memory to emulate the extra 64 MB + that used in overhead.) I have no reason to expect that if the emulator is good that this won't work.

    It'll probably run faster than MacOS X on the Centris too. After all, OS X needs a PPC, which is totally different than a 680x0, so it needs to be emulated at the lowest level. But a 686 isn't very different from a 486, so an emulator could take advantage of this.

    That this works at all is not really a testament to the robustness of OS X, but instead a testament to the robustness of the PearPC emulator. As far as OS X is concerned, it's running on a PPC box. Just a very slow one ...