6 Nov
2012
6 Nov
'12
2:19 p.m.
On 6 November 2012 21:54, David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote:
Mileage varying a /lot/ here. Until I flogged it a couple of months
ago for a very healthy ?45 or so, I ran 8.1 on mine. I found that just
fine.
[Nod]
I just attach multiple SCSI drives. :?) It's not like you need very big ones!
I didn't find it so, actually. The Classic II maxes out at 10MB of
RAM; 7.6.1 recommends a minimum of 12MB. I did not expect it to work.
It did, very well.
I think 7.6 is the absolute best OS to run on a PowerPC. I haven't
run it on an '040 any time recently, though I imagine it would be
acceptable, but I see very few downsides vs. running 7.5.x on a 68K
machine.
Could not disagree more. I run/ran my PPCs on 9.1 or 9.2.2 if they can
take it, as a rule.
You may find running Netatalk 2.x on your server alongside FTP to be
a MUCH more pleasant way to transfer files.
That'll be tricky, it runs Windows Server 2008. :?D
3.x did, yes, but 2.2.x is still maintained until they finally
decide to drop support for it. It's still readily available
from most package managers.
OIC. So I wasn't totally wrong. That's good. :?)
Ha! I ran one of those on my SE a long time ago (I managed to
find an SE Ethernet card a while back, though, which solved
the problem rather better). I have an Asant? Ethernet-to-
LocalTalk bridge that someone gave me with a LocalTalk-only
printer, but it's not entirely satisfactory (in particular,
it's weird about enumerating the LocalTalk side). I'm almost
of a mind to build a bridge of my own with a small Ethernet-
capable micro and an external 8530, but I keep making my
queue longer with other projects. :-\
If I can persuade or bribe Tony into fixing my SE/30, I shall be
looking for an Ethernet board. And an external-monitor adaptor, lots
of RAM and AU/X. ;?)
It's subjective, of course; DHCP is great (and some things don't
work so well without it; for example, I can't browse my Windows
machines' SMB shares if I give them static IPs for some reason),
but there are a lot of things I'd rather run static. Old
machines fall into that category, because it also makes it a lot
easier to do a tcpdump to see what they're trying to do when
they're not working. :-)
Life's too short for that sort of thing, for me. I am only doing this
for fun. I find it an excellent, generally-applicable rule of thumb
that anything involving hexadecimal is not fun.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
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Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884
On Nov 6, 2012, at 4:20 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
Well, yes, that is true.
But I started out on Macs in the very late days of System 6 & moved to
System 7 within months. I am used to a clock in the menu bar, a
hierarchical Apple menu, a modular control panel, a screen-saver,
things like that. It is perfectly possible to add all this to Sys6
with some INITs and CDEVs - although it was tricky to find them when I
did it, and that was 5-6y ago now.
Ha! Screen savers. I remember After Dark; it was one of the most
reliable ways to make your Mac unreliable.
Interesting. Never noticed that, back in the day, and it was so
popular it was near-ubiquitous.
With enough addons to make it a pleasant and
productive environment,
System 6 was not really significantly smaller or faster than 7.x, but
it was a lot more limited.
The definition of a "pleasant and productive environment" heavily depends on
personal taste. :-) I'm running only a few extensions on the SE and LC. With
the addidional 192K RAM Cache, this adds up to a 800KB System in RAM, with
MultiFinder, without Finder. Some of the Now utils
(clock in the menu bar, drop-down Apple Menu items) were quite
handy before they were absorbed into the OS, and didn't really
take all that many resources.
I forget whose or what I used. I don't think they were anything to do
with NUTD, if that's the Now you meant?
But once you
have, I found it took as long to boot as 7.6.1 on my
Classic II and was only very slightly more responsive in use.
I found 7.6 to be almost unbearably slow on my LCIII (which isn't
actually a bad machine for an '030), whereas 7.5.3 ran quite
comfortably faster. That was with 20 MB RAM, which is rather
much for either; forget running 7.6 on 4 MB. I must admit,
I don't use any Macs slower than that. I have an LC2 but
I mean just to fix it up & try to sell it. 68030 is as low as I want
to go these days, I think. :)
Well, and the LCII was a dog. If you do a side-by-side comparison
of the board layout with the original LC, you'll see that it's
nearly identical (down to the crippling 16-bit bus) except that the
'020 has been replaced with an '030. The LCIII was what that
machine SHOULD have been. Certainly, I
would run the lowest system version that did what I
needed if I was on a 68000, so I agree with you there.
System 7 works on my SE (4 MB RAM) for a number of things, including
quite a few games, but it doesn't leave a lot of room for things like
MacTCP. I have a switch to choose between 7.0.1 and 6.0.8 (if you
don't have it already, System Switcher is a REALLY handy util). I ran 7.6.1
from preference. Its performance was just fine, even on a
machine below the official lowest spec the OS will support. By modern
OS standards it is tiny and very simple and quick.
Maybe it's reasonably quick when it's running but booting is painfully slow
on low end machines. Especially *with* extensions to provide a "pleasant and
productive environment". ;-) For what it's worth, I feel like the Mac OS peaked
at 7.6, and it's
all been (non-monotonically) downhill from there.
Again, I disagree. 7.6 is the best OS for 68030s, but for 68040s I
much value the facilities of 8.1 - pop-up folders, drawers (damned
near essential on smaller screens), HFS+ for bigger disks and so on. I
also think the 8.1 Finder looks better.
I feel like there
was another local maximum at 10.4 (and another somewhat lower one
at 10.6), but it's kind of apples vs. oranges at that point.
I miss Classic mode, but I find the facilities of Leopard - Spaces,
for instance - so very useful that I have pretty much abandoned Tiger
now.
Concur about 10.6, though.
Btw, modern standards: Are we talking of
retrocomputing or are we talking to
squeeze the last bits out of old machines so they can be used like new ones?
Well, not the latter, no. But I want to get stuff on and off the Mac
as easily as possible, so I want it to be able to read and write PC
floppies, maybe even PC Zip disks; I want it to at least be able to
FTP stuff on and off my server, and once I have it running, so I want
the best web browser it can run, even if it is not going to be used to
surf. FTP works, more or less,
but it trashes resource forks and just isn't as nice to work with,
even with a nice client like Fetch.
I move binaries around inside Zips or Sits. For text files or Word
docs, it doesn't matter too much.
I can't even think about running a web browser on
pre-OSX Macs at
this point, though Classilla is tempting (though not available for
System 7, right?).
Whereas IKWYM in general terms, I actually liked MacOS 9. Anything
that can run 8.6 can run 9.1 acceptably and I find it preferable.
I think our attitudes differ on this.
The 2 goals that I was trying to optimise my setup advice for were:
#1 run the most modern software the machine can
#2 run the software which will be easiest to get working
#1 wasn't the best idea even when the machines were in their primes.
If I had the desk space to run my 7300 as an everyday machine (and
were willing to put up with the whine of its absurdly loud Barracuda
next to me all day), I think I'd demote it from the 9.1 I'd upgraded
to by the time I stopped using it to somewhere around 8.1 (with 7.6
as an option). I just feel robbed of performance (and stability)
with the newest stuff that will run on it. Ditto goes for OS X
machines; my MDD G4 runs twice as fast with the first version of
Tiger on it as it does with the last version, which is appalling.
As in, 10.4.0 versus 10.4.11? I noticed no difference. Never really
have with point-releases.
10.4 feels slower than 10.3 & I am toying with downgrading my B&W
G3-with-a-G4-in-it to Panther, just for nostalgia. I have no need for
Dashboard and I don't /really/ need Spotlight.
10.5 might be slower than 10.4 but the extra facilities are worth it.
This also applies to your opinion about AppleTalk. AT
is running fine in my
LAN. Several printers get their data via AppleTalk, many old machines
exchange data with AppleTalk. Broad Cast depends on AT. Program Linking
depends on AT (which I'm experimenting with the aid of the MPW shell).
My Linux Box runs Debian 6 with a Debian-supplied Netatalk 2, so exchange of
data is like a charm between all generations of Mac OS, from 6.0.7 up to
10.5.8.
Oh! Well that's good to know. I thought recent versions of Netatalk
dropped Appletalk support and only ran AFS over TCP. If if comes down to machines not equipped with
Ethernet or Token Ring,
there's no other choice than running AppleTalk over LocalTalk. One may use
MacTCP or Open Transport to encap IP into AppleTalk packets, so still IP is
possible (with a maximum MTU of 576 Bytes).
Aha! I use an Asant? EtherSCSI. If I can't have Ethernet and TCP/IP, I
regard it as not being networked, these days. DHCP is not a must-have. I'm running DNS on my
Linux-Box in my LAN, so I
don't want to have dynamic IP addresses. There's only a small DHCP-Range,
just for "guest boxes", for netbooting XTerminals or my G5 when I need to
run Disk First Aid, for a fast installation of Debian on friend's boxes. Any
static (in terms of will-not-be-moved) machine has static IP-Adresses
configured. I don't get the point why machines, which don't change networks
(like a notebook, taken from place to place), need DHCP. Avoiding IP
collisions? Is a matter of documentation. For me, my documentation is the
DNS zone files.
No, it's not a must-have, but it makes life a /lot/ easier. I like an easy life.