Show Idea: Pimp your old iMac (G3)

[lazymonkey44]

I think it would be cool to "Pimp out" an old iMac G3. Adding things like:

-Webcam
-Bluetooth
-DVD Burner
-Battery (No cables!!??)
-Larger HDD
-Install Tiger (Or Linux, Ubuntu?)
-Add more USB Ports
-SD card reader
-And then after that you might need a fan....

What do you think? I know many people have an old iMac just lying around, so why not?

Os/x security wise probably will not be supported much longer the the ppc mac. The last os/x I ran was 10.4.8, but linux runs faster on those old machines. Fedora, Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, Suse and other linux distributions still support the ppc mac. I ran debian and ubuntu on my 300 mhz or so g3 towers till I decided to scavenge them for parts. When I can get 1+ ghz pc's for free, I did not see any need to support them anymore. If I wanted to I probably could put them back together. If I get some spare memory I might put the towers back available for use. I still have my imac running ubuntu hardy. Getting the video to work in gui mode was so much fun. Besides Mac being great linux media/file servers, they make great oversized diskless thin clients for ltsp using netboot. Yes that is right you can pxeboot macs from an intel box and run linux.

I was till running debian and fluxbox on the imac when I took this picture. It breaks my heart that a lot of schools discarded these units as being worthless and they could have been repurposed with linux to save the school quite a bit of moola.

[nickhamm]

Well, I found a couple of links to get the ball rolling because I would like to see this happen too:

512MB PC133 133Mhz SDRAM Memory Module - http://www.partspc.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProdID=16859

WD Caviar WD1200BB 120GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive - http://www.centrix-intl.com/details.asp?productid=6194

MCE Internal DVD-/+R/RW + DL SuperDrive - http://www.store.mcetech.com/dvdrwimacsl.html

Motorola G4 7410 processor 550mhz Logic Board Upgrade - http://store.fastmac.com/product_inf...products_id=46

Looks like you can max out the iMac at 1GB of memory, max out the hard drive at 128GB, and the DVD DL burner is for slot loading models only. The G4 logic board upgrade is expensive and only supported by some models, but apparently delivers 3-4x performance over the G3. I have an iMac DV 400 system running 512MB of memory with Tiger 10.4.11, but it would be nice to add some spunk to it because it's still a good machine.

the imac updated to ubuntu instead of debian.


Latest ubuntu linux install cd for the ppc. I have not tested it my self yet. I want to find a spare drive to to install it withouh bashing my good install.

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/daily/current/

Turn a ppc mac into a media server with GeeXBOX.

http://geexbox.org/en/start.html