Improving a bit ...

Slowly it is coming together. You don't have to twist your neck for this shot.

Green, green

Yup, the kitchen is painted. Still have to do some touch-up on the cabinet carcasses and then remount them, but things is looking up. Yup.

Whadda mess, eh?



Don't worry, we will fix it. Just turn your head sideways to view. Yup.

To finish, to finish.

Whew. The last of the drywall has been hung, and is taped. All I have to do is finish it.

Of course, then there is the garage to finish, and the basement ceiling, but those are not really pressing. A journey of ten years will end with the stroke of a paintbrush. Or something like that.

Insert title here...

Gotta write something. Kitchen is a mess. Half the ceiling drywall is finished and waiting to be sanded, but I don't want to put the cabinets back up until the walls and ceiling are primed and painted. Mowed all day long, but the mower wasn't working right until Jesse came over with Tony and fixed it. Did get most of the clippings picked up, though, and on the compost pile. Jumped the Lumina to start it, and found out the problem with the turn signals was an unplugged connector under the dash. Put almost $50 worth of gas in it, and didn't even fill the tank.

Have to write something for the other blog, too.

Flop

Well, that didn't work. Disk 2 had an error on it; the system required a reboot, and the ROM couldn't find a Mac OS because, like I was afraid, the whole drive had been reformatted for Linux.

Did a reformat, and I'm back to a 500meg OS9 partition and a 3.2gig spare partitons (Mac HFS).

Maybe I'll set my sights a little lower tomorrow, and try installing Sagittarius.

Bow Yow!

OK, so I gave up on Ubuntu. The installer kept hanging up and dumping me into a command line interface from which it was impossible to move forward with my limited Linux shell programming skills (maybe I'll get better?). So I took the alternate route, and checked out Yellow Dog. Turns out there was a recent release (5.0.1, Phoenix) just a week or so ago. I downloaded the 6 .iso CDs, then dounloaded the 4 .iso CDs for v 4.1 (Sagittarius) and the 3 .iso CDs for v 3.0.1 (Sirius), just in case. Yellow Dog seemed to have better support features (although warning that Old World Macs are unsupported beyond v 4.0) and guides for installing each version.

It seems to be working. The install image has been copied to the hard drive, and the 900+ application packages are being installed as of now. There was a little confusion with regard to the drive formatting; I am hoping all the formatter did was hit the Linux partition and leave the little Mac partition alone. I'll find out when it is time to reboot -- if it doesn't work, I can always go back to the Mac install CD, reformat the drive, and start over.

I guess this is why so many people are afraid of Linux. There are so many machines with so many flavors of installer that you have to hit the right combination. On the other hand, it's free, and the application suites are free, and in terms of performance, it makes old machines function like new ones.

Everything has tradeoffs.

Shell Game

Well, from my reply to Michael in the previous post, you can see that I get to a shell prompt (BusyBox's ash) but am not having any luck from there out. I've even altered the command line in BootX, adding some variables that other attemptees have posted on-line. The Ubuntu install just won't go to completion at this time.

Ah, well. Ubuntu DOES say that the later releases are not supported on Old World Macs. Still, there are people who have done the difficult. I intend to eventually be one of them. In the meantime, I might have to try a Yellow Dog release.

Line UX

OK. Trying to put together a 'puter for Grannie. Something cheap (means on hand) but up to date. I think Ubuntu Linux will be the solution. The second beige G3/233mHz/192mB desktop was choking on OSX, so I formatted and did a clean install of OS9.2.2 from the eMac disk Mike got me. It runs, but that is a slooooow machine in Classic, and is almost completely unsupported with up-to-date browsers and mail clients.

BTW, Mike - Apple has a tech sheet that says the grey screen with the refusal to go to Open Firmware is the result of upgrading the beige G3 to a hard drive larger than 8gB and then downgrading again. Takes some fiddling with the PRAM to restore it.

Downloaded the Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) .iso file and burned it to a CD. Found out that the beige Macs are "Old World" and will not live-boot Linux without a resident Linux kernal. Downloaded BootX and have to burn a disk to transport it from the G5 to the G3, since the G5 has no floppy and the G3 still is not networked.

From all indications, I will have to reformat the G3 hard drive and partition it, then reinstall a minimal OS9, add the BootX, and create a Linux Kernals file in the System folder. At that point, from what I have been reading, the Ubuntu CD should live-boot. That's what I get for being cheap. "New World" Macs live-boot the Ubuntu CD straight out of OSX. So do the Intel/AMD based machines (and if I could scrounge an old Winders laptop from somebody's roadside trash, I could have a modern go-go-'puter!).

The Ubuntu CD comes packed with the whole system and applications -- Open Office, Thunderbird, and Firefox included -- and a desktop that looks and handles like XP. All I will need will be a PCI modem card and a video card with S-Video out (Grannie will need to use dial-up or DSL, and her TV is bigger than my 20" screen and has an S-Video port -- might be easier for her to see). I saw a Radeon 7000 card on eBay for a buy it now price under $40.

Once that is running, I'll have to put something together for Mix. Jesse still has that 6400 and he isn't using it; it should easily run the same Ubuntu release.