Monday, 31th May, 2010
iMac G3
Sometime ago, I was lucky enough to acquire a 1998 or 1999 era iMac G3, Bondi Blue, 96MB of RAM (6MB shared with the video card, I think), 8GB hard drive, 333MHz G3. Many thanks to the Computer Recycling Project at The University of York.
And for sometime, it sat on my desk, mocking me. I couldn’t get it to work. It just sat there, looking pretty and smug with itself. I tried to do a netinst of Debian 5.0 on it once before, but it failed somewhere along the lines.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago, and I move house, and I get it all set up in my new room — The LAN port is near at hand, my laptop gets WiFi, so I don’t have to share the connection. I can get going with the machine that I’ve since christened “Lovelace” after Ada Lovelace.
Clearly, the University network hates this machine, it doesn’t have wpasupplicant on the netinst CD, I can’t connect. I am forced to install a very basic system on to it. Which I do. I then spend an evening getting the wpasupplicant deb files, and a few other packages and installing them. With this done, I eventually get a working network connection!
Then comes the big task, getting a graphical web browser up and running. I decided to go with FluxBox and IceWeasel (Basically a re-branded FireFox). All is good!
Eventually, after fighting with the xorg.conf file for a while I get it work. Of course, the first thing to do is some Eulering.
As it turns out, it run GHC (The Haskell compiler I usually use) really quite well, if a little slowly. Also, all of the algorithms I’ve written run at least 10 times faster on contemporary machines, leading me to infringe upon the 1 minute rule for some problems. Ooops.
I’ve yet to try Python on here, but it’s only Python 2.5, where I’m looking to move to Python 3.x asap.
TL;DR I got an epic new machine that I wish I’d had longer that runs so slow, but it’s so cute.
Note: It can also play CDs! Joy!