Rehabing an old iBook g3 500Mhz dual USB

Hello all. I just picked up an old iBook and it was running Panther and was dreadfully slow. I wanted to use the machine as a backup laptop as my wife is very hard on machines. It was too slow and couldn't run a browser modern enough for her school work, so I now have a pretty white doorstop. I have tried to do a few things with it but have been less than successful. my latest attempt has been to wipe the hardrive and install Debian testing on a very minimal net install. This met with mixed results. After 2 days of struggle I have decided to try to get the original OS or older back on the machine. I found razormac's wonderful post on the subject and as far as I can tell it came with osX 10.0 or 10.1. I am looking for retail images (iso's) of these disks. I was also wondering if I could go even farther back and put OS 9 on there. My goal now is to turn it into a simple movie player for my son. I don't need WIFI or any real bells and whistles, just the ability to play avi and m4v files smoothly. Thanks in advance for any help.
Paul

sgtdetritus said:

After 2 days of struggle I have decided to try to get the original OS or older back on the machine. I found razormac's wonderful post on the subject and as far as I can tell it came with osX 10.0 or 10.1. I am looking for retail images (iso's) of these disks. I was also wondering if I could go even farther back and put OS 9 on there. My goal now is to turn it into a simple movie player for my son. I don't need WIFI or any real bells and whistles, just the ability to play avi and m4v files smoothly. Thanks in advance for any help.

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Just a word of warning. If you install an older OS X version...the computer may run faster...but it will be even less compatible with anything modern than it is currently with OS 10.3 "Panther".

I might also add...that older Mac OS X versions were a bit clunky (user interface was not as efficient or refined)...so speed gains may not be as much as you think...and you will lose features in the process.

You could install OS 9...but you will need an OS 9 install disk...and then this computer will be even LESS compatible with anything modern.

My suggestion would be to run OS 10.3 "Panther" or OS 10.4 "Tiger" (the most modern OS this computer can run). Tiger will probably be slower than Panther...but it will have more features. Also...maxing out the ram on this computer (if not already)...may speed things up a bit.

HTH,

- Nick