Re: Wall Street PowerBook support?


Subject: Re: Wall Street PowerBook support?
From: Black (cpa@ece.cmu.edu)
Date: Fri Jul 20 2001 - 09:24:28 MDT


On Fri, 20 Jul 2001, Ben Stallings wrote:

> Hello -- I'm new to the list, so if this question has already been answered
> often, please let me know and I'll try to find it in the archives.
>
> I have a "Wall Street" PowerBook G3 Series (pre-USB), and I'm pondering
> whether it makes sense to install Yellow Dog. I have the following
> questions:

I've been running YDL on a Wallstreet for well over a year now. It is a
266 mHz machine. I run it on a 4 gig partition on a removeable bay
harddrive (and I have plenty of space left over...). Up until last week, I
was running it on only 64 M of RAM (just upgraded to 192...). It runs
great on my machine. Perhaps not as speedy as some newer machines, but
that goes for the mac side as well...

>
> * Will an install fit on my 2 GB hard disk and 98 MB of RAM? What extent
> of upgrades would be in order?

You should be able to fit an install (probably not the "everything"
install, but you probably don't need most of that stuff anyway...)

>
> * Will it support the features of my hardware, including audio in and out,
> multiple screen resolutions (including video out), and a SuperDisk drive?

Audio out works just fine. I haven't tried audio in. I haven't had a great
deal of success swapping between multiple resolutions on my machine (but
then once I got it to run nicely in 1024x786 I was uninclined to fool with
it. I have used the video out (ran an LCD projector with it), and that
worked fine. I don't have a superdisk drive, so I can't report on that,
but it does fine with the expansion bay HD and hot swapping the battery
and the CD-ROM drive in the other bay (though it crashes if I put it to
sleep when the battery isn't in).

> * I see from screen shots that Yellow Dog apparently allows you to run Mac
> OS in a window. Is that feasible on this machine?

Yup. I could never get it to work until recently (when I put in the extra
memory...), but it works now (though you might want some more ram - other
world computing has 128 M sticks for our machine for like $25...). There
are some issues with it that I haven't had time to figure out yet.
Apparently virtual console switching doesn't work very well with the
powerbooks (I couldn't get it to work right, and I found various posts on
various lists about people having trouble with it, and no solutions...).
But, it will boot into an X window as well, so there is that. I can't get
my command key to be recognized by the mac side either, and I'm still
trying to figure out how that works... For more information I suggest you
check out www.maconlinux.com.

So, you milage may vary, but I've been pretty happy running YD on my
Wallstreet.

-Christopher



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