There’s been a rash lately of these “30 days with…” articles that have forced me, the lowest of the low on the internet, to respond with one of my own. Granted, it’s not going to be the 10 page extravaganza that the others have been, but I think it’ll be worth at least reading the first sentence before you shake your head in disgust and resume masturbating to your censored Japanese hentai. So bear with me while I write a humorless update.

I’ve not been using my computers lately. There’s nothing wrong with them, I just find that after I spend my days fixing other people’s horrendous issues with computers, I don’t even want to look at mine. I’d rather read a book or something. But this has forced me to sit up and do something: I scored a free dual processor PowerMac G4. And holy tits do I love it.

A list of specs, before I begin (for those too lazy to click the link… jerkbags.):
– Apple Mirrored Drive Door PowerMac G4.
– Dual 1GHz PowerPC 7455 processors.
– Originally 512MB of RAM.
– 80GB IBM DeskStar 7200RPM hard drive.
– Apple Superdrive (really a rebranded Pioneer 2X DVD-RW drive.)
– ATI Radeon 9000 Mac Edition with ADP.
– 2 USB 1 Ports, 2 Firewire 400 ports.

The very first thing I did with it when I got it home is yank out the pitiful 80GB IBM “Deathstar” hard drive. It was boring, slow, and apt to fail. It was quickly replaced with a (slightly more questionable) Samsung 120GB drive that I honestly trusted more. I also added an extra 512MB of RAM, bringing the total memory to a respectable 1GB. After these upgrades were complete, I popped in my the first disc of my spare OSX 10.4 installation media. After a zippy 20 minute installation—which surprised me, considering the hardware—I was all set and ready to go.

Initially I had some concerns as to how well Tiger would perform on the 7 year old hardware. Mostly concerns that began with “this shit is so old…” and ended with “predates cancer.” But, instead of being able to whine about the slowness, I was proven wrong; the damned thing was blazing fast. So, content with how things had turned out, I went to sleep.

But the second day turned out a few more realizations: I wasn’t satisfied. The GUI was somewhat choppy, I was missing out on the niceness of Core Image, and the CPU usage when scrolling down my Applications list or a website was just extravagant. I couldn’t deal with it—I demand hardware acceleration. So I set off to see if there was any way to get Core Image enabled on the awful included Radeon card.

There wasn’t.

That angered me. So far, all of the upgrades to my Mac were just random bits of hardware I had laying around my apartment. The idea of this setup is to keep everything absolutely free, so I wasn’t going to go drop $200 on an overpriced Radeon 9600 Mac Edition. There’s gotta be a better way.

After some lengthy research, I found that it was possible to flash the firmware on my old, unused GeForce FX5200 to make it compatible with Mac hardware. So after some more digging, I came across StrangeDogs, a forum dedicated to flashing PC cards for use on Macs. Great! I downloaded the closest firmware (although it needed to be edited to keep in sync with the clock speeds of my godawful FX5200) and flashed the card. I installed it in my Mac and…

…Nothing. Well poop.

As it turns out, you need to somehow disable pins 3 and 11 on the card. To make a long story short, those pins regularly used to force recognition of AGP 8x speeds on standard PC motherboards were used for enabling Apple’s ADC (Apple Display Connector). At the time of the PowerMac’s design, AGP 8x was unheard of, so the pins were unused. Fine. So I grabbed some scotch tape and carefully taped over the pins, rendering them useless. HEY COOL THE CARD WORKS OH MY GOD.

The result was beautiful. Instead of a laggy GUI that was bottlenecked by the awful video card, I now had a snappy, responsive, and feature-intensive interface with all the bells and whistles that come with CoreImage being enabled. I could scroll, dock events could bounce, I could even use fast user switch! OOOOOH!

So 2 days into my PowerMac experience, I’m very pleased. I’ll keep updating as I find more and more neat features to wax on about. Until then, die in a fire and stop reading this drivel.

So I installed Kubuntu, which is the KDE offshoot of Ubuntu. Aaaand I reinstalled OSX onto my other box, and mounted it into a really ugly (but nicer than the one I had) Compaq case.

Check it out—screenshots/linuxdesktop.jpgscreenshots/osxdesktop.jpg
Isn’t it pretty?