Just inherited a powerbook g4 with Panther, I need advice.

[nintennuendo]

I'm a windows user mainly. I dual-boot my xp pro with Ubuntu 8.04 quite a bit, and besides this new mac, I haven't used an apple machine since 7th grade, over 7 years ago, and that was mainly playing nanosaur and bugdom, unless you count my ex-gfs ipod nano. My coworker who used his mac for pictures, the monitor is kinda fuzzy now, so he got a new laptop with xp. my boss is mainly windows for our entire domain, except for two users. he was just going to put this laptop on the shelf for like 4 years. i asked if I could take it home to mess with it, he said he could loan it to me under the facade of testing out remote software or something. I want to install tiger on it. it has about 550 MHZ and 512 of ram, so it fits the minimum specs. Does it burn dvds? I don't know since the guy who had it isn't tech-savvy, and my boss doesn't remember. if theres a webpage for it, let me know.

I also inherited a LaCie 60gb firewire hard drive that had some pictures on it. it says only 30 is available, but I'd like to erase it and put junk and crap on it. Any googling I do gives results for how to format for both XP and Mac, but I don't really want to use it with XP, since I have a 320gb hd i use on xp. Another Q, will my ntfs 320gb hd work on this comp?

yet another question, if this does not have a dvd burner, how could I install tiger from the firewire drive?

Finally, last Q, where could I find ram for this machine?

thanks in advance, sorry for the wall of text

[nintennuendo]

Also, now that I'm home, I can't connect to my wireless network. I can on my own laptop, so thats fine. The laptop has a wireless card in, I go to system prefs, theres a Wireless Config at the bottom, theres options there to configure for my net settings, but none of them are selectable. Please help.

[nickheer]

It should have a DVD reader in it. Hold down the Option key while clicking the Apple in the top-left corner, and select "System Profiler..." On the left, select Disc Burning. Then you can check what it can read/write.

To format your drive, fire up Disk Utility (located in ApplicationsUtilities), select the drive and go to Format. When it asks what file type, select HFS+.

Your NTFS drive will be able to be read from, but you can't write to it.

RAM can be found at http://www.macsales.com/

Hopefully I answered a few questions well enough. I don't know what's up with the wireless network. Is your home network 802.11n only?

[nintennuendo]

I don't know how to check if its n only. I think i installed a Proxim Skyline 802.11b card, since i can specify my settings now in Wireless Config, but nothing I seem to try works. I have a wep key set up for 64-bit, but i can only select AirPort 40 or 128.

Holding the option key and clicking the apple give the same menu. I tried System Prefs, then CDs and DVDs, where there are options of what to do when something is inserted. Theres an option for a Blank DVD, so i'm assuming it writes.

[metallicamaster3]

Go into Disk Utility (ApplicationsUtilities) and look on the left column to see what the model and your capabilities are for your optical drive.

Press the apple menu, then hold the option key, there you will see "About this Mac" turn into "System Profiler", which when you click will take you to system profiler.

I assume the 500MHz means it is a PowerPC G3 or early G4 model PowerBook -- can you specify if it is a Titanium PowerBook (which I'm pretty sure it is, the Aluminum models were at least ~800MHz when they came out)

There are also CD versions of Tiger floating about, if you know where to look . So if you don't have a DVD drive or a drive that can't read DVDs, at least you can burn the CDs in the DVD's place.

[nintennuendo]

Found profiler, Also found it earlier, didn't know they were the same thing. its a cd-rw/dvd-rom. I will try to locate a cd version, but I'd rather put the .. ahem, disc on a firewire drive and boot it from there. My understanding is, I have an image of the disc, go to disc utility and .. burn it to the drive?

[metallicamaster3]

you can do that; you will need to extract the (assumed) ISO or DMG image to the firewire drive.

1.) Mount the image with tiger on it.

2.) Plug in your firewire drive, then open disk utility.

3.) Click on your firewire drive (NOT the partition) (click the one without the indent in the tree) and click on the restore tab.

4.) Click and drag the mounted image from the tree (it should be listed as a removable device) into the "Source" area on the restore tab, then click and drag your FireWire DRIVE (again, NOT the partition) into the "Destination" area. Be sure to check the "Erase Destination" option. Then reboot holding down the Option key, then choose to boot from your firewire drive, and install Tiger.

[nintennuendo]

Okay, last problem being Internet then.

How can I enter my 64bit WEP key and where do I enter it?

[metallicamaster3]

If the networks are greyed out, then it seems either the card or OS X doesn't support it. Try either getting an actual AirPort card (Apple Branded), and/or Upgrading your OS.

[nintennuendo]

Theres no option for networks to be visible. Before, the Network config in Wireless Config in Other in SysPrefs was grey, but now I can edit them, but nothing works. Where would I find available wireless networks?

[nickheer]

You would find available wireless networks in the AirPort menu bar extra. You'll see something that looks like this:

If you can't see that, navigate to SystemLibraryCore ServicesMenu Extras, and double click on the Airport.menuextra item (I think that's what it's called anyway).

[metallicamaster3]

oooooh, thanks for the pinstripes flashback, nick.

[nintennuendo]

The menu Item for AirPort doesn't come up. Some called IRdA and OS 9 Classic somethings come up, but no AirPort. I don't even know where to set it up. I'm going to put Tiger on it in a couple of hours though, would this fix the issue? The wifi card is installed, as far as I know.

[nintennuendo]

Got Tiger on it, figured out how to install VLC, everything seems to be working except the wireless internet. When I plug in the card I get a pcmcia(?) icon that says INTERSIL HFA384x/IEEE. The other wireless card I found out, i think, won't work at all, its a linksys wpc11 card. This one says Proxim Skyline 802.11b on the front. is there any chance? This was the wireless card that came with the laptop, so I assumed it was, somehow, workable. is it, or do I just need to splurge and get a new card?