okay, this is getting really frustrating:
one of my two remaining computers is a blue and white G3 mac with a “Sonnet” G4 upgrade chip, running Os9. i keep it running Os9 because all of the software i have for mac is stuff that’s Os9 native (quark xpress 5, photoshop 7, fontographer 4, kai’s super goo, etc.). however, either the computer or the operating system is becoming more and more sketchy as time goes on: i can’t keep the computer running for more than a day without having to reboot it, even with nothing running, and frequently, when i try to print something, it starts to print and then it says it has “lost communication” with the printer, and instructs me to try again, but the document in the queue stays in the queue, it doesn’t get deleted. when i try to delete it manually, it says that it’s “still in use” but it doesn’t print, and nothing else that i have sent to the printer after it will print, and very shortly after that, the whole computer freezes, or doesn’t freeze but loses the keyboard. it won’t shut down when i select “Shut Down” from the menu (presumably because it thinks it’s still printing) and when i use the “programmer’s switch” to shut it down, i have to run disk doctor, because it has developed “serious” errors in the B-Tree directory which only get worse if i don’t run disk doctor.
also, when i first boot up, if my external, USB CD-RW drive is hooked up, it says that it can’t find drivers (?) for the "non-specific QT processor with JG" (whatever that means), but can’t “connect to internet”, despite the fact that i can connect to internet at exactly the same time. admittedly, i get almost exactly the same error from windows when i connect the CD-RW drive to it, so that’s probably a problem with the CD-RW drive and not the mac, but still, with my linux box not working, it means that i can no longer burn CDs, which is a royal pain in the neck.
i’ve been seriously considering “upgrading” to OsX, but then i would have to run all my software using the emulator, which would only slow things down, and i don’t know enough about OsX to be able to do any good at all if something screws up.
meanwhile, i’ve somehow been able to crank out a phone book advertisement for a client, but i have been unable to print invoices, and i have had to run disk doctor eight times since 8:00 this morning… 8/
yeah, it does, doesn’t it… the only good part about it is that i have two hard disks the smaller one – which is “only” 4gb – has the system and software, and the big one – 40gb – is data only, so if necessary, i can jetison one of ’em.
i’m familiar with OsX operation, i used to work with OsX when i was at the print shop, and my wife has an OsX laptop that i dink around with from time to time, particularly when i have to burn CDs recently… 8/ it comes with bash and csh preinstalled. it’s the hardware i’m more concerned about. if the system disk is going bad, i’m going to have to think about getting a new one, and i don’t have that kind of money floating around right now…
Ewww. That sounds like hard drive failure in the works, which is really going to suck if it ever decides to crash completely on you and devour the data on it.
OSX runs, interface-wise, much like MacOS does, and has a console that you can prod around in if you really need to do things. I think you can even install bash or something like it on an OSX machine. So it’s a hybridization of your Mac knowledge and your Linux knowledge.