20 July 2003
troubles and resolution
So I've got a beige G3 now, one of the last Macs before they started to look colorful and/or cool. For a machine running only at 266 MHz I'm still quite impressed, but that may be my PC bias where processing power is heroin: most people get some, want more, and can't really give a good reason why. Anyway, impressed as I was with MacOS 9.2.2, the real purpose of this experiment was to get my copy of Jaguar up and running, and I was led to believe it would be an arduous sort of experience.
It was, but it shouldn't have been.
I suppose I should point out that I'm using a Gateway 2000 monitor with a little adaptor. The "2000" on the monitor betrays how behind the times I am with some of my PC kit as well, it seems, but it works okay for my Athlon box, the G3 running 9.2.2, and presumably would do so for 10.2. Except that every time I tried to boot the installation CD, the monitor would snap to attention and then turn itself off. I tried it again: boot, blank screen. This is what I would call a major setback.
I must've tried it thirty times, putting the CD in, holding down all manner of startup keystroke combinations, and still my monitor stayed blank. So I played with 9.2.2 some more, attempting to update my SCSI firmware and knock out any other "obvious" hurdles. Once downloaded, most were unnecessary, and merely time-consuming. I had more frustration with windows internet connection sharing, which also wasted a lot of my time when I didn't properly diagnose what was wrong. Basically, it wasn't working.
When I say "it wasn't working", I mean, it wasn't working in Windows either. Rather than presenting me with some sort of error message saying "Sorry, but despite the existence of a perfectly good LAN connection, Windows has decided to only pretend that it's sharing the connection. Banging your head on the keyboard a couple times may help" the computer just trucked on as if nothing were wrong. Finally I fixed it with some arcane magic and alchemy, and the Mac was ready for the web. So I read up on Beige G3 Jaguar experiences.
Most were pretty bad. I knew I was in for trouble having only 96 megabytes of RAM to throw around and only an old PC monitor to look at, but I wasn't yet interested enough to sink any money into the experiment. I did manage to hunt down a monitor from a Performa, and only confirmed my blank-screen difficulties. So I tried the install a couple more times with no success. Then I stumbled across XPostFacto, and thought that my troubles were solved.
They weren't. I had the same troubles with the blank screen. Frustrated, I tried one last time, jamming down the return key and leaving it running, hard drive churning away. Twenty minutes later, the installer appeared. I had the next three hours to contemplate what I'd done wrong. And also to ponder the reason I needed localized files for Brazil, China and (I think) Klingon.
So what was wrong? I think the installer would've worked right away, though I cannot be sure. I had at some point removed jumpers to give my hard drive SCSI ID 0 which might have helped, but it was the patience that really did it. You see, my monitor can't handle the new startup screen with the grey apple logo and the little spinning thing, so it turns itself off. The old Performa monitor also had trouble with said grey screen, but I excused it for being old. And it doesn't matter now, since everything works.
So I'm posting this with Safari. Whee!