From: isw on
A relative lives too far away for me to travel there. He has an old Blue
& White running OS X 10.3.9. He badly needs to upgrade his OS so he can
use more "modern" browsers. He is also rather low on the "tech skills"
scale.

I have a Family Pack for Tiger, and would gladly assign one of the
licenses to him, but I can't figure out how to make it happen.

Tiger installs from a DVD, but the B&W can't read those.

The B&W can't boot from a USB device.

I could install Tiger on a hard drive here and mail it, but do I have to
install on a B&W (or a G3) for it to work?

I have a Pismo laptop (a G3); could I stick a hard disk in an external
FireWire box, install on that, and then send him just the drive?

Suggestions?

Isaac
From: nospam on
In article <isw-509369.10131328062010@[216.168.3.50]>, isw
<isw(a)witzend.com> wrote:

> A relative lives too far away for me to travel there. He has an old Blue
> & White running OS X 10.3.9. He badly needs to upgrade his OS so he can
> use more "modern" browsers. He is also rather low on the "tech skills"
> scale.
>
> I have a Family Pack for Tiger, and would gladly assign one of the
> licenses to him, but I can't figure out how to make it happen.

the family pack license only applies to those in the same house, or a
child at college.

> Tiger installs from a DVD, but the B&W can't read those.

external dvd drive will work.

> I could install Tiger on a hard drive here and mail it, but do I have to
> install on a B&W (or a G3) for it to work?

no.

> I have a Pismo laptop (a G3); could I stick a hard disk in an external
> FireWire box, install on that, and then send him just the drive?

yes.
From: Geoffrey S. Mendelson on
isw wrote:

> Tiger installs from a DVD, but the B&W can't read those.

At one time Apple had a deal for people who bought Tiger (which was only sold
on DVDs) and did not have a DVD drive. You could send them your media (DVD)
and pay a small shipping fee ($10 in the US) and they would send you a set of
CDs (4) which installed the same thing as the DVD.

While you can't do it now, you probably can find someone who has a copy
of the CD media and would make you a copy.

Licensing is another issue, as someone else said, your family license does not
apply.

Now here is the big gotcha. If it has a revision 1 motherboard and they upgraded
the hard drive, it may no longer work. Revision 1 motherboards have a problem
with the disk controller. The chip supports 33mHz and 66mHz DMA, except that
it does not work properly with 66mHz DMA. Data is stored in memory locations
it should not be, often in places where there is no memory, so things silently
get corrupted.

MacOS X before Tiger checked the controler and turned off 66mHz DMA if it
was on and the chip was defective. Since Apple never sold a B&W G3 with a
revision 1 motherboard and they wanted to people to buy new computers, they
dropped the support in Tiger.

For some reason revision 1 B&W G3's often had disk failures, so it is likey
that the drive was replaced. If it was replaced with a non Apple drive larger
than 10 gig, it likey will fail when installing Tiger.

Spend the little money and buy him an almost identical G4 without the problem,
a DVD drive, etc. Unless he needs the ADB port, it's a much better machine.
Since many of them do not support Leopard, they are just about give away items
if you can find them.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm(a)mendelson.com N3OWJ/4X1GM
I do multitasking. If that bothers you, file a complaint and I will start
ignoring it immediately.
From: nospam on
In article <slrni2hr6m.3f6.gsm(a)cable.mendelson.com>, Geoffrey S.
Mendelson <gsm(a)cable.mendelson.com> wrote:

> Spend the little money and buy him an almost identical G4 without the problem,
> a DVD drive, etc. Unless he needs the ADB port, it's a much better machine.
> Since many of them do not support Leopard, they are just about give away items
> if you can find them.

spend the little money and buy him a mac mini which will totally blow
away a g3 or g4 in addition to be able to run modern software. a used
one can be found fairly cheaply.