The eMac Project

It all started a couple of months ago, when I found an eMac on Craigslist for $60. Neat! I thought, a project computer. Little did I know…

It arrived in good condition, just a sharpie wound on the top edge that I tastefully covered with a sticker. Once that project was completed, I decided to start in on installing Ubuntu. Unfortunately, the LiveCD wouldn’t work. It would boot up and then end with a black screen. Cock. Fortunately, the alternate-installer cd is text based, so I could use that. Ubuntu installed, let’s start up. Boot screen, and… Blackness. After spending several hours on the Google, I figure out, it’s a problem with the X windowing system’s configuration file. It has no way of working with the eMac’s built-in display. No windowing system, no UI. I had no experience editing an xorg.conf file, I don’t know what most of the settings mean. I’m barely able to edit a text file from the command line. After some more googling, I found a copy of somebody else’s xorg.conf file for an eMac, for another version of Linux. But I somehow managed to figure out which settings I need, saved the changes, and rebooted. And result! I managed to solve that problem.

But it was so slow in Ubuntu. Running Panther, the machine’s paltry 256 Mb of RAM didn’t offer much but it was able to run decently. Not so in Ubuntu. It was slooooow. The time from clicking on a menu to the menu actually being drawn was measurable in seconds. Ok, I’ll get some RAM then. 2×512 Mb sticks from OWC, $60 shipped. Not a bad deal at all. Amazingly, replacing memory in the machine is quite simple, only one screw involved. And speed was much improved. Hurray.

But after spending a few days with Ubuntu, I realized that I don’t really care for it. Despite three days effort, sound wasn’t working. There was no plausible workaround for the fact that there’s no Flash support for a PowerPC Linux machine. And that’s not all. A lot of the big selling points of Ubuntu simply haven’t caught up with PowerPC support, and might never, since it’s such a tiny sliver of an already small segment. It was time to switch back.

There was just one small problem. It didn’t come with any CDs. And since it only has a CD-ROM drive, any DVDs I had lying around wouldn’t work. I did some web searching, as there are places online where you can still buy old OSes, including Jaguar and Puma. Only problem is, they’re very price. And I’m not willing to pay $75-$130 for a dated system. Unfortunately, eBay auctions for CDs were few and far between, and frequently had bids pushing to the retail prices. Finally I found an auction for a set of eMac restore CDs. I asked the seller if they were CDs, just to be sure, and he said yes. So I bid, and won for the amazingly low cost of $35 shipped. A few days later the CDs arrived, so I eagerly put them into the plucky little eMac.

And nothing happened. The eMac refused to boot from the CD drive. Ubuntu wouldn’t even recognize that there was a CD in the drive. Did some more googling, even posted on the PPC section of the Ubuntu support forums. I put the CD in my iMac to make sure it wasn’t a bad disk. It was fine. I ejected the disk and that’s when I noticed something. On the disk it said “DVD”. Even though I had asked specifically if it was a CD and was told yes. Shit.

At this point, I made an executive decision. It would be cheaper to buy a DVD drive for the eMac than it would be to drop more money on disks. I popped down to the shops and found an ok DVD drive for $49. And it even has Lightscribe. Whatever that is. I tear apart the eMac using Wilko’s eMac teardown guide. It’s a pretty machine inside, all shiny chrome and neat parts, so I took some pictures, which will go up on the Flickr soon. Continue taking it apart… Still taking it apart. 45 screws later, I pop the new DVD drive in. 45 screws. That’s bad. Then there’s putting the whole thing together, remembering which screws go where, and so forth. When I finally put it together, I only had four screws left over, and no guarantee that the drive or machine was even going to work when I hit the power button.

Plug it in, nice spark from inside the translucent power cord, hit the power button, and it works! Put the DVD in the drive, reboot, and even that works! Amazing! So now I’ve got Panther running on the machine, a 700 Mhz G4 eMac that only cost me $205 altogether.

So that project is all finished, I sit down to see what I’ve missed in the RSS feeds, and I see this.

Cock.

© Copyright jWiltshire.org • Powered by Wordpress • Using a modified version of the Detour theme created by Brian Gardner.