2008

Thu, May 29

<01:06 EEST> "Today" I finally received the diploma for my completed teacher studies. It's nearly two weeks since the last "supervision", but naturally the formalities took their time. I've already moved into a summer-theatre way of life, with evening rehearsals as my main daily activity.

Of course there's plenty of time to hack on things for once, and in a nice incident I looted an iMac G3 from the university throwaway pile last Friday. The hardware appears to be in perfect working order. Booting to OS 8.6. by default is painfully slow, though a marginally interesting peek into the computing history. With 64 MB of RAM, I'm going to install some more before going all Gentoo on this thing.

I've fancied a PPC machine for some time, and I'm not quite sure what to do with this one eventually, but I guess installing Gentoo will teach me a thing or two. The Bondi Blue case is intriguing in its own right, and with a modern OS this could make a nice basic web/office machine. On the other hand, the essential hardware could be packaged neatly into a small server box, something like this.

In fact I've already just built a VGA monitor adapter so I can go without the built-in space heater CRT. I took a deep look at some schematics and recycled a VGA extension cable that lacked the DDC pins for monitor detection. The cable happened to have proper coaxials for each of the R, G, and B, and I've kept the respective grounds separate. It's interesting that the iMac has somewhat conventional connectors for power, display, etc. inside the one-piece machine, a positive surprise for hardware geeks, which I didn't expect from the Apple's sleek consumerist image.

Naturally, I've tested the machine with a number of Linux live CDs, but I'll need more memory to run a proper "desktop" distro to test video and audio stuff. The SDRAM SODIMMs I found on eBay should be on their way...