Posts from Saturday, March 19th, 2005

Just a quick update to say that work on both S5 and Gatekeeper has come to a screeching, if temporary, halt.  On the last night of SXSW, my PowerBook started suffering frequent kernel panics with no apparent source—they happened after an hour of trouble-free operation, thirty seconds after logging in, ten seconds into the reboot process, etc., etc.  Occasionally, they’d happen in such a way that the computer could neither be shut down nor booted up with the power key.  I had to pop out the battery and start again.

And why didn’t I boot off the OS X install DVD that came with it in an attempt to fix the problem?  Because the DVD drive stopped working a few weeks ago.  For all I know, some short in its circuitry got bad enough to start panicking the kernel.  I hadn’t gotten it fixed because with all of the conferences and other work, I couldn’t afford to be without the machine for two days, let alone a week.  I’m just thankful that the system held out until after SXSW, when I have some time to spare.

So for the next several days, I’ll be working off of my trusty old G4/500, running OS 9.1.  Since it doesn’t have a local copy of Apache running (it being Classic OS and all), I can’t do live testing of Gatekeeper, so it’s on pause.  The laptop is also where I have Virtual PC running, so any further coding work on S5 will have to wait.

All this has me wondering, though—is it reasonable to run OS X on a G4/500 with 384MB of RAM and an ATI 8MB VRAM card?  I don’t have the hard drive space to do so right now, although I’m about to fix that.  I’m just wondering if it would be worth it to try to run OS X on this guy.  Anyone have any experiences along those lines?