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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."

4 of 499 comments (clear)

  1. Cheating? by Hatta · · Score: 5, Interesting

    IMHO using an emulator is cheating. You're not really running it on the Centris. You're running it in a VM that is running on a Centris.

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  2. Wow by bnenning · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That is impressive. And it probably even gets around Apple's BS EULA clause that claims you can only install OS X on Apple hardware.

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    How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
  3. Re:Yay! by jargoone · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yeah, about that. I bought the RAM, and while trying to install it, I broke the fucking memory slot. :-( Now I don't know what to do. I've installed memory probably a hundred times (literally), and never broke anything. I didn't exert any more than normal pressure. I still don't know what happened.

    Apple won't help -- it's explicitly excluded in their warranty. Paying for the repair would cost more than I paid for the laptop. So I'm stuck with pretty much a useless laptop, unless I go back to OS 9.

    My only hope is that the logic board problem in this series will rear its head, and that they'll replace it in spite of this issue. Otherwise, I'll just have to eBay it and eat the difference.

    I'm pretty bummed about the whole thing. I decided to buy my first Mac and see what the hype is sbout, and this is what happens.

  4. An Excellent Demonstration of Church-Turing... by borgheron · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is an excellent demonstration of the Church-Turing hypothesis.

    Boiled down, it basically states that any computer can emulate any other. :)

    GJC

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    Gregory Casamento
    ## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep