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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."

23 of 499 comments (clear)

  1. And in other news, I sat and watched plaster dry by DarthBart · · Score: 5, Funny

    This one qualifies for the "Too Much Time on Their Hands Award".

  2. Yay! by jargoone · · Score: 5, Funny

    the boot screen has taken 1.5 hours to appear, and the ETA for full boot is almost exactly 1 week!

    Gee, sounds faster than my wife's ibook G3/900 with 128M of RAM! Maybe I should upgrade to this!

    1. 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.

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

    Because it was there?

    --
    Sig
  4. Boot Time One Week!? by SillySnake · · Score: 5, Funny

    I had a windows system like that once.. But it wasn't emulated :-/

  5. 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.

    --
    Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    1. Re:Cheating? by Guspaz · · Score: 5, Informative

      What's the difference? The first PowerPCs used a (hardware) emulator to run virtually ALL software, since nothing was native at that point.

  6. Re:Very simple question... by mekkab · · Score: 5, Funny

    WTF else are you gonna do with a Centris? Play Marathon?! Or Spectre VR?

    --
    In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
  7. Re:LOL by Tod+Hsals+5000 · · Score: 5, Funny

    and i always thought that trying to load doom3 on my abacus made it freeze... it seems i need more patience!

  8. 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.

    --
    How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
  9. wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    imagine a beowolf cluster of those...

  10. Re:Very simple question... by LostCluster · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why?

    For those who haven't bothered to mouse-over that foot icon attached to the story, it's indicates that this story has been attached to a category known as "It's Funny. Laugh". That's the reason why this story made Slashdot.

    Why this was done in the first place? Dunno...

  11. Ultimate? by SunPin · · Score: 5, Funny

    If "has done the ultimate" equates to "has smoked crack" then, sure, it's the ultimate.

    --
    Laws are for people with no friends.
  12. Simple answer ... by pavon · · Score: 5, Funny

    I don't know, but I want to marry her.

  13. 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.

      --
      The ______ Agenda
  14. 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.

  15. And on the other end of the mac spectrum... by RalphBNumbers · · Score: 5, Informative

    VT has officially got the BigMac up and running faster than ever at 12.25TF with 1150 dual 2.3Ghz XServes.
    Check out the announcment.

    I wonder how many Centrises that equates to...

    --
    "The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
  16. Journal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    OSX load journal: Day 6: Power outage.

  17. Re:Watch by Average_Joe_Sixpack · · Score: 5, Funny

    i'd do her

    As opposed to your usual crusty tube sock ... yeah I'm sure she's flattered

  18. 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 ...

  19. Re:That is a bullshit answer. by NanoGator · · Score: 5, Funny

    "I mean really, what the fuck is that supposed to mean? I don't go around killing people just because I can."

    Would you go around killing people if you couldn't?

    --
    "Derp de derp."
  20. 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

    --
    Gregory Casamento
    ## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep