Hey all... I was just gifted a Blue & White Powermac G3 450 with a ATI Rage 128 from a friend of a friend (well, not so much "gifted" as "I'm gonna throw this out unless you take it"), and I thought I'd use it to try out some different OS's. I've been trying to install MorphOS 2.5 on the machine without much success; holding down C during boot does nothing, and if I try to go through Open Firmware, I get a gray screen with a circle with a cross through it. From what I've gathered, this isn't an officially supported configuration, but I thought I'd get farther than that. :)

So what's the verdict? Can I edit the boot CD in some way to make it work on the G3? Should it work anyway, and did I just burn it incorrectly (I used Brasero on my x86 Ubuntu box to burn the disc)? Or am I just out of luck?

[ Edited by HeartBurnKid on 2010/9/20 20:17 ]

The B&W/Yikes! models are not supported at all in 2.5 and will not be supported in 2.6 either. The B&W is not among the Power Mac models announced to be supported in the future.

Although MorphOS would be the perfect OS for such a G3 machine nowadays, you're really out of luck. Not only this particular model won't be supported, the used ATI Rage 128 isn't supported by MorphOS, too. The best you can probably do is to use your B/W as a OS9 machine or install Linux on it. OSX should run upto 10.4.11, but it won't be fun.

Apparently Tiger is probably the fastest OSX version on limited hardware, but give it as much memory as possible, that really makes a difference to speed.

My experience of Linux on Macs is, not good, but heck it might be good for you...

Well, my experience with Linux on a PPC Mac was better than my experience with a Peg2 and Linux, although the Mac was slower (G3 350 <-> G3/600). But I think it depends largely on the tasks you're doing on it. Regarding OSX, it heavily takes advantage of Altivec, right? My experience with Tiger on a G4/400 was quite ok, but I don't think it should get even slower than that...