(Good) 8500 Jaguar Upgrade Experience |
December, 06, 2002 4:11 PM |
ed |
Last night I successfully upgraded my 8500 to 10.2.0 - there were some unusual experiences along the way, which I will describe in detail in case they can be fixed by Ryan, or if not, should at least be documented. I have an 8500 with a Newer Technology MAXpowr 250MHz G3 with 256K L2 cache. The machine has 176MB of RAM. I have been using 10.1.5 for some time. OS X and bootable OS 9 are installed on separate partitions, which I recommend you do! I have 9.2.2 on the OS X partition. First of all, I patched XPF 2.2.4 as described in another note, so as to avoid the "can't cold boot into OS X problem" some of us experienced. I do not recommend that you do this until Ryan integrates this into XPF, unless you are really good with ResEdit. I did the L2CacheConfig thing, then plunged into the installation. Follow Apple's instructions on "upgrade and archive" and be sure to check the box that preserves your settings. NOTE: It preserved everything EXCEPT the Time Zone (sets to PST) and the root password (you will need to reset this by starting a reinstall fro, the CDROM, choosing "Reset Password..." from the Installer menu, and quitting Installer after you're done). When I pushed XPF's Install button, a LOT of messages scrolled up the screen, mostly about not being able to resolve dependencies or find files. These appear to be benign, but a bit scary. NOTE: It will pause a LONG time at the line "devfs on /dev", maybe a few minutes - be patient, it will start up again and the Installer will take over. When it rebooted at the end of the Install 1 CDROM, the gray apple appeared on the screen, almost immediately followed by "tire tracks" across the screen and a hang. I simply restarted (command-control-power), held down the option key and was back in OS 9. I then started XPF, selected both reinstall BootX and Extensions, selected my OS X disk and pressed Restart (do NOT select the CDROM and press Install). It booted perfectly (no messages on the screen) and asked for the second disk. After the second disk, it had to be restarted through XPF again. In fact, it seems that you will need to reload BootX and the extensions every time you use the installer disk for anything (such as resetting passwords or running the Disk Utility). It seems that booting the installer disk wipes out something that XPF puts on your OS X disk. AFTER THE INSTALLATION, I COULDN'T BELIEVE HOW FAST EVERYTHING WAS! It could be Jaguar, it could be that I did something wrong with the 10.1.5 version of L2CacheConfig, but speed appears to have doubled. Every application launched almost instantly. My benchmark is running iTunes with the Visualizer - not only was the frame rate double what it was before, but there were absolutely no "drop outs" in the sound when I fiddled around on the desktop. If the cause of the speedup is Jaguar, all I can tell you is buy it and install it! It's cheaper than getting a faster processor. There are many other little hidden delights (like a calculator that downloads the latest currency exchange rates and can convert between any two currencies on the planet) so don't fear and don't delay! Ed |
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