The Geek Shall Inherit ...

the 1999 iBook? -- Picture by blogSpotter

by blogSpotter
Every once in a while, I have to reestablish contact with my inner geek. The last two weeks have been incredible geek weeks for me. For Christmas, my brother Steve gave me a 1999 Apple iBook (Bondi blue & white). At the time it came out, it was called “iMac to go” and was a continuation of Apple’s “Think Different” campaign. Their newer MacBook seems to be a little more in the corporate (go and and say it – Dell) mold with its metallic squareness. I have fond memories of iBook, back when things were boldly different.

Problem is, the iBook hadn’t been used since 2002, and still had OS 9 which was obsolete circa 2001. Other deficiencies were a missing airport card and no wireless mouse. I thought I could tolerate OS 9, but was amazed at how kludgy and ugly the interface was. It still had iTunes 2.0 (no music store) and Internet Explorer 5.0 for Mac.

With a couple of trips to Frye’s, I was able to outfit it with a Macsense wireless Ethernet adaptor, a Belkin USB hub and an aqua blue G-cubed laser mouse. These changes alone brought it forward half a decade. Next, I scrounged across the Internet to find install discs for Mac OS X 10.3.9 (the last X release for Power PCs). OS X is a giant mutation for operating systems – maybe one of the best OS’s ever created. Installing OS X turned the iBook from a slow frog into a prince, albeit a slow prince. I was asked by a friend, “How many computers do you need?” considering this runs me up to about seven. Well, how many cars does Jay Leno have? About that many.

Not content to enjoy my iBook refurb, I set about trying to install Ubuntu Linux on my old Dell Latitude 386 laptop. Some friends have told me that Linux is friendlier than the last time I tried it 5 years ago. I’ll give my experience in condensed form – do not wish to bore or depress you...

• New Ubuntu wouldn’t load on the Dell, although Red Hat loaded OK 5 years ago. Seems Linux has gotten hefty right along with Mac and Windows in the last few years.

• Ended up installing Fedora on my Western Digital USB hard drive instead. This was an arduous process that called for multiple tries, web research and manual partition-editing to create a boot and a swap section.

• More web research to find out that the partition must be unmounted for the install to proceed.

• Had to update my HP Pavilion so that the BIOS would recognize a USB drive as a boot disk. This called for web research, downloading a BIOS update and reflashing the rom.

• When I tried to boot from USB at this point, I got “BOOTMGR is missing”. (Booting from hard drive is OK, thank goodness). This is my last status on it – have made it no further.

What compels me to burn endless hours on these pointless pursuits? Every bump along the road has sent me to lengthy Google searches, Mac forums and Frye’s trips. There will be no public awareness (beyond this feeble blog) nor will I even make extreme use of these toys after I configure them all. My answer is as lame and witless as the mountain climber – “I do it because it is there”. And so it goes, on this third, continuous week of the geek.

FOLLOW-UP -- 1/19/2009

I finally was able to install Linux. I reran the install program and checked a box that said 'force as primary partition'. After getting it installed, have had trouble getting various things to work (eg, MP3 player). May dink with it some more later, but I'm Linux'ed out for now.

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