No I am stuck using this piece of crap and am also stuck with OS 8.1 which, as fate would have it has NO support what so ever!
People bitch at Microsoft for not supporting their products, but Apple takes the cake for planned obsolescence. I was told by an Apple salesman that you CAN get OS9 from Apple without OSX, but not according to the Apple website.
My first problem is the CD-ROM, it does not like Burned CD's at ALL, can I just pop that piece of crap out an put in a 52X IDE burner in in its place or is it a Sony Paystation story where you have to fork out A LOT of money to buy a company brand burner from Apple?
CD-R discs come in many subtle versions and are not going to work on all drives. This is true of all computers that have proprietary drives built into the case. You'll have to have those discs re-burned on an Apple approved burner. The older iMacs use el-cheao CD drives.
My second problem is how in the heck do I install Mandrake Linux on this, it will not boot off the CD, infact when I look at the contents of the CD's it looks kinda like you got to install that crap by hand, if that is the case, then forget it, I'm not a Linux nerd, I was ease of use (is that so hard to ask?).
I think the binary versions of Mandrake are for x86 only. You'll have to compile it all yourself to run it on PPC, and that's a real hassle. Also, the Mandrake package installer in 9.2 appears to be completely broken, because every time I use it, my "Start" menu gets culled, and it runs into tons of dependency issues and almost never installs things correctly.
I'm really getting pissed off with Mandrake, anyway. It's probably the slowest OS I've ever used (and KDE doesn't help). Try looking for a PPC-only version of Linux, otherwise you're in for a wild ride.
oy oy theres nothing wrong with Macs providing u got OS X and upwards. I'm not sure if it will run well but add RAM and it shud be capable.
OS X is the finest OS I have used EVER.
On a 233 Mhz iMac? Forget it. I saw OSX running on a dual processor G5 and I thought it was damn slow even on their flagship machine. Of course, that was a demo system, so chances are all the eye candy was turned on.
Besides, who wants to pay $100+ for OSX to run on a computer several years old? Apple has discontinued all support for OS 8.5 and older. OS9 is your best bet.
Firstly, you would be well advised to get OS X and more RAM. All the crashing is the result of not having enough RAM, but in OS 8 -9.x, RAM is not allocated dynamically as it is in Windoz.
Actually, OS8-9 uses dynamic memory allocation for the OS itself, but not for the apps. If your apps don't use a ton of memory, OS8-9 should be fine. Hey, at least you can manage your memory. Other OS's suck up everything in sight.
OS 8.1 has about 200 system extensions, though, so tracing crashing problems can be a real pain. I used to be a Mac sysadmin, so I can tell you that the story that Macs don't crash is complete crap, even if they are dedicated Photoshop machines, like I used.
