Computers made by Apple before the first iMac (pre-1998) got a ROM chip that contains a basic OS, somewhat like the 8-bit computers (Apple II, Commodore 64, CoCo). The system in the ROM of those Apple computers is quite basic : searching a OS to boot from. The OS should be System x.x from Apple. Since it's a ROM chip, you can't reprogram it (new world macs got a flashrom, so you can change it and different OS). Of course, I want to run something like Linux, OpenBSD or Darwin on my PB G3 : it's not lightning fast, but capable system, at least for command line and simple GUI. I want to program the system in C and ASM (I love PowerPC chips, but that's another story).
My exact model is a Wallstreet II 233Mhz, with a 30Gb HD (obviously not the original one) and 192Mb of RAM.
I've tried hard to install Linux, Darwin, NetBSD and OpenBSD on it w/o success. I don't have the original disks nor a System 7-8-9 install CD. It looks like it will be just a pretty paperweight. I finally managed to install Mac OS X jaguar with a flashlight : there's a bug in ATI driver which close the backlight of the screen. So I can use it, at least after pressing the brightness button after the initial boot and until the computer goes to sleep (when it woke, the screen will be black, because the driver won't re-enable the backlight).
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| From Powerbook G3 Wallstreet |
Some folks have more success, but, as far as I know, they have System 7-8-9 installed on it before changing to Linux, Mac OS X Panther (not officially supported, but at least the ATI bug is fixed). Maybe I could install NetBSD from the network/NFS drive (which I haven't tried).
I wasn't able to install developer tools yet (my old CD is busted), so I can't program in C or ASM. But I can program in Forth (that's another story) and I've now had a PB G3 Pismo on which I've got OpenBSD.
