The story of: "Firefox and the Power Mac 6100"

Once upon a time, there lived a Power Mac 6100 who felt so left out of place in the 21st century that it was on the brink of becoming a doorstop for its owner's door. The 6100 wanted to proove to its owner that it still had some usefulness left in it, aside from the occasional messing around with Photoshop.

In all seriousness, I was lucky enough to come accross a copy of the old Connectix VirtualPC 4.0.2......... Windows 98.......... SECOND EDITION!!!! Having remembered that FireFox 1.5.x for Windows requires AT LEAST Win98SE, I realized that this was the perfect opportunity for me to see how this thing runs on a G3-upgraded 6100.

Now WHY would i want to do such a thing? Sure there is the old MS Internet Explorer 5.1.7 for MacOS 9.1 and earlier, but it doesn't even work on a lot of the new sites out there. Even trusty iCab, doesn't display many of the common pages out there correctly. Prior to getting my hands on a copy of VPC4.02, there were next to no viable web browser solutions for modern-day web browsing and related activities. Using Firefox under emulation sounded like the PERFECT solution to my problem!

There several catches however.

I am restricted to working in a resolution of 640x480, the maximum resoltion my hardware can support in 24-bit color. If i were to go to a higher resolution with my current hardware, I'll only have 256 colors (8-bit), which is unacceptable. I have to wait for the Power Macintosh AV card I've ordered in the mail last week to come in before i can even begin to break free of my 640x480 limitation.

Next, I only have 72 megabytes built in. Obviously not nearly enough to run a large OS like MS Win98SE or newer. I'll have to wait until my pair of 64MB simms come in through the mail. But once I receive and install them on my machine, I'll have a total of 136 MB of RAM, and obviously more to allocate to VPC and the entire operating system in question.

Ubuntu Linux 6.06 (LTS), appears to work......... but only up to the screen where it says that it finished loading the Linux kernel and couldn't detect the correct mouse and keyboard in use. At that point, I just get a cryptic, blinking character-entry prompt. I guess running Ubuntu as a substitute for Win98 is just out of the question.

So what did I do and what are my reults?

The speed is rather slow, like reverting back to a PowerPC 601-based machine (slower than molasses, at times).

But even if its slow, at least i get to run a modern browser in my 6100 that is pretty much 100% compatible with most if not all of the major websites on the web!

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UPGRADING TIME!!!!

Well, sort of... I only just placed an order for a new-in-box Power Macintosh AV card (an Apple-branded video capture card) for my 6100, along with a pair of 64 MB SIMMs (RAM).

I bet you're asking why the hell is this guy spending any amount of money on a machine as old as the 6100? Well, I've given the argument that I simply wanted to extend the usefulness of my original investment. My reason TODAY is that I just love this machine so much!!! It was my first computer and has served me faithfully for all these years, even when I did most of my early college work on my Windows PeeCee. I think my 6100 deserves some real TLC and respect. Is there a better way for me to do that? No, I'm not gonna donate or recycle this baby!

In the meantime, I'm working on another project. It's still a LONG way from being done. And no, i'm -NOT- gonna release this one, since it is not my work, so to speak. I'm simply updating the "Smooth Stripes" Kaleidoscope scheme by MaxThemes.com.

Essentially, I just did the following to it:

• repaired the progress bar's graphic to not display fragments of blue along the bottom of the bar
• made the menus translucent
• and swapped-in some Minium icons

Check out my latest screenshot!!!