A PowerBook this old is not supposed to be able to run 10.3, but thanks to a little utility called X Post Facto…
After running X Post Facto, the computer reboots in verbose mode and runs some low-level stuff from the regular hard drive (including some fudged/hacked files and extensions placed there by XPostFacto) then swaps to the CD which boots w/o complaint. I installed Panther, and rebooted. Required a Command-Control-Powerkey to get it to start up again, booted into 9, repicked the MacOS X (formerly Jag, now Panth) volume to boot from, reboot. Supplied Install Disk 2 on request, it finished up.
Installed VillageTronic VTBookDD card driver and rebooted with Sony Trin hooked up as second display, success. (the TFT screen’s colors are not right, btw – what the OS thinks of as black is dark navy blue, and some light blues are purple. Persists in “Millions of Colors”. But the Sony looks perfect as main monitor.)
Now (I thought to myself) comes the fun part, and I shut down and swapped out the stock daughtercard for the mighty Sonnet G4. In addition to the processor being non-stock, the Sonnet daughtercard is sporting 512 MB RAM, whereas the stock card only has 256, and Other World Computing’s own XPostFacto forum is full of posts to the effect that to get Panther to work on a WallStreet you have to lower your RAM to 384, max. But I hit the button and it came up fast and fine.
Old? My pretty little curvy computer is just five years old and still in its prime, what’re you talking about? 