On Fri, Apr 13, 2001 at 09:08:26PM -0400, Joseph Sarkes wrote:
> Are the apple G4 systems any good

If you're going to go this route, do some reading on the port-macppc
mailing list archive.

Our support of the hardware in these machines is variously really
good and really shoddy. And the fact that there are about twenty
distinct versions of OpenFirmware out there makes things a bit
tough. I've found the easiest OF to deal with is 2.0f1 (if you can
find a beige G3 used, it has this), but that's just my experience.
(It's necessary to change a few OF variables to get things to work
at all, but once you have, it's easier to deal with that OF 3, which
has to be booted in some more awkward ways.)

There's presently a problem with keyboard support (both USB and ADB)
on the blue & white G3 boxes, but it's in the process of being
repaired.

Myself, I'm very happy with my 7500 motherboard (in a 7200 case,
don't ask) with a G3 processor upgrade, but I never use the console
and wouldn't want to. (This machine has OF 1.0.5, which is so broken
as to allow us to use only 640x480 resolution. There may be some
Forth magic to do in OF to fix this, but nobody's figured it out
yet, and we just use the hardware devices as OF initialized them for
us, so it's stuck.)

       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net