I heard about MorphOS on the TenFourFox blog. I have a collection of PPC apple hardware that I like to use but was not getting much use from. MorphOS was something I could use even though I had not heard of it until a few months ago.

I started by putting it on a mac mini G4. In the process I discovered the mini did not like 1920x1080 on my main display. I dug out a 17” 1280x1024 dell LCD and things went well. I needed to burn a MorphOS install disk. My daily driver laptop does not have an optical drive so I ended up using the OS X 10.5 on the mini to burn the disk. All I could find was a stack of DVD-R’s but the mini had a DVD-R drive so it worked. I let the MorphOS installer take the entire drive. The mac mini still has a mechanical HDD and at some point I will put a SSD in and setup a dual boot.

I have an eMac and I decided to move it up to my desk on the main floor of my house. Long ago at CTY I learned to program C++ on a tray load iMac G3 so the Apple CRT all-in-one formfactor has a special place in my heart. I went to install with the disk I had burned for the min and the eMac only had a CD-ROM drive. I ordered some blank CD-R’s. And to “eat my own dogfood” I used MorphOS to burn the install ISO on a CD-R.

MorphOS on the eMac looks good, like they were meant to go together. Using Wayfarer I could hear HDD noises. I decided to order an SSD for the eMac to hopefully speed up Wayfarer when it is caching to disk. While I was at it, I ordered a 1GB RAM stick for the mini, it currently has 512MB.

Now I have some non-trivial upgrades to do on PPC macs. I am not sure what is worse, opening up a 20-year-old Mac Mini or getting to the HDD on an eMac.

I have all sorts of old computers. I have a Kaypro 2 ’83 that can boot as a 2 or a 4 depending on the boot disk. I have 2 Epson APEX 8088’s. I have a 386SX that was my family’s first computer. I have PPC Mac’s, I have intel Mac’s. I have OLPC XO-1s, XO-1.5’s, a XO-1.75 and XO-4s. I have a HP mini note 2133. There are plenty of computers in formfactors that I like that were a dead end.

I like EvE online. Any computer that can run a RDP or VNC client can be used to play EvE from my gaming rig. The RDP client on MorphOS is slow talking to a W11 computer for gaming. I have not tried VNC yet, but I hope it will be better.

I am excited to use MorphOS. Aminet and MorphOS Storage look like they have plenty to try.