wiredfool

I’m now aquired and installed Panther (the family version) on an external firewire drive.

Verdict 1: It doesn’t play nice with my Geforce 4MX card in the Sawtooth machine. After the first disk wants to reboot, I’m left with a black screen. Attaching to the tibook works, so finishing the installation works.

Verdict 2: It does work on the tibook, and seems snappier than Jaguar. I’m not sure if this is due to Panther or the fact that it’s installed on a 7200rpm external drive, rather than the internal 4200rpm one.

Verdict 2.5: Powerbooks are no fun with a 5 lb firewire drive attached to them.

Verdict 3: If you change your admin user name using NetInfo Manager, make sure that you alter the sudoers file and the admin group to include the new username. You will need sudo and niutil to fix things. Or alternately, make sure that you have an alternate boot disk that you can resurrect things from. Scratch that. If you do anything using NetInfo Manager/niutil, make sure that you have an alternate boot disk.

As for verdict 1, there is at least one solutions that I know of for getting up and running, and I strongly suspect a second.

• Replace your geforce driver with the one from 10.2, which can be downloaded from Other World Computing, or found on your 10.2 drive. It’s named /System/Library/Geforce.kext . See here
• I strongly suspect that simply removing that kernel extension will also work, since I had mine installed with the wrong permissions the first time Panther refused to load it.

Both of those solutions leave you without quartz extreme, so it’s a bit of a hit, especially since we’re talking about a 400mhz machine here. But it does work, which means that I can get on with the business of mucking about in the new os.

And as an aside, this video card doesn’t work in 10.1.x either, which is also a pita since I’m still (sort of) supporting some apps on 10.1. Swapping video cards to change osxen is not a good long term policy. (but those solutions look terribly promising to the 10.1.x problem too. Promising, but not effective.)

***Update!

It works in 10.3.2! Quartz extreme, and oh it’s nice.