I dont Know how to quit you
Its been here for over a year now, and when you measure its uptime against the rest of the systems I have , one would think its a lampshade or some fancy ornament for the living room. Yet .. its a computer none the less. Its poor and meager 350 MHz power-processor is four times slower then even the lightest computer around here .. but still this old geezer has not been sent to oblivion as most of its peers have been. So what in hells name propels me to keep this little bugger ? It doesn’t really DO anything, If it did , it would be SLOW at it .. and it isn’t even modern anymore. So why is it still here ?
Simple answer.
The answer is as simple as it is baffling : Its pretty ! and for some unearthly reason I have grown fond of it. The story began over a year ago when I managed to buy two Mac G4’s. As I was loading them up in my car ,the guy says, “Well , those are the last of the working macs around here” “ Oh” , I asked “ Do you have any broken ones too ?” The guy nodded and pointed me to a dark and gloomy shed “ Still got an old G3 in there, its broken so I’m gonna take it to the scrap-heap” All of my “Save the wales, the puppy’s, the baby seals and the old computer ! “- alarms went of in my head as I said , Well , just give it to me and i’ll do that for ya too. My head was thinking: “yea ! spare parts” Next thing I know the guy pops an old bondi blue G3 in my trunk and tops it of with an old 17 inch bondi blue cinema display. “Broken too” he mumbles.
Don't tell me its broken.
Now .. telling me something pretty is broken and cannot be fixed is like slapping me in the face with a leather glove. I feel challenged, compelled to prove you wrong and fix it. Wether its my God-like itch (to create life from lifelessness) or my Ferengi greed (moooore computers .. mooore !) I do not know. But 3 days later the Little G3 was up and purring. Replacing the power supply , taking apart the ENTIRE casing in order to clean it and popping in 512 megs of ram revived the little bugger. The screen miraculously healed itself and ( it drew power from the broken power-supply , so DUHUH) and I had kittens from joy.
So now what ? Mac Os 10 would NOT install on it. I spent hours to get it working , tried and tried again , but to no avail. Even my expert mac geek friend gave up and said .. let it go my friend. But i was not going to quit .. Like a regular doc frankenstein I huddled back to my layor with the lifeless hulk and downloaded the one potion that would surely revive even the most simple systems. I summoned the power of ubuntu !
Running smoothly.
So now i’m more than happy to report the latest distro of Ubuntu is running smoothly on this hand-me-down given-up-for-dead G3. I don”t know what makes me more happy , the fact that it looks cool and runs at a very decent speed or the simple realization that I have made something productive out of a system that would have been sent to the dump.
The funny thing is I have some other way faster computers in the house , yes I remain facinated by this old G3 and keep spending time on it. As said in “broke-back” mountain : I don”t know how to quit you .. and quite frankly I don’t know why that is. But what I do know is that it not only will make a very nice linux testing system it will also be the prettiest ubuntumachine in the house.