Surplus auctions rule!!!

Just picked up a powermac G4 466 MHz (including keyboard, mouse, monitor) for $100. Unfortunately it lacks the hard drive feature at the moment, but I have an old 20 GB drive sitting in an old PC at my parents' house, whom I will be visiting in a week. For now, I have a kubuntu live cd downloading, which should hold me over untill I can get a hard drive in there. I'm not sure if I'm going to do anything useful with it, but I've always been infactuated with macs, and this should be a good "fix". It even came with one of the newest (with the exception of the mighty mouse) black pro mouses, which, according to ebay, is worth a good $15 by itself!

Thats a good deal with a cheap price.

Welcome to the forums.

Very good deal there. I don't know how far you want to go with it, but you upgrade it quite a bit. For OSX, upgrade the RAM as far as you can afford. it takes PC133 in the case of the 466 Digital Audio and has 3 slots and each will take a 512MB Dimm. You can use 120GB Hard Drives with the built in controler or use a PCI IDE card for larger drives. You can upgrade the CPU and the Video Card. The Video uses an AGP 4x slot.

Let us know if we can help you in any way. I have that basic machine but with a 667Mhz CPU. With a few upgrades it can be a very fast system. You got a GREAT deal at $100.

While we're at it, can anyone think of any linux live cd's theyve been able to successfully boot on a system like this? Kubuntu dapper unfortunately does not boot. At this point all I have been able to do is boot into open firmware and mess around (hey, its a new toy, I've got to do SOMETHING with it. Also did some basic commands just to confirm that the hardware is indeed working properly). This is really reminding me of the time when I got a Nintendo 64 for christmas but with no games.

What I used was a Ubuntu Live CD. I can't remember the version but it worked great on even my 333 Mhz iMac G3 leave alone my G4's. It was not that dapper version. It was just Unbutu for PPC.

Are you going to get a hold of OSX eventually for it?

Edit: It was this version. There is an install and Live CD.

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/old-releases/hoary/

Thanks, I'm downloading it now. As far as OS X goes, I have two competing thoughts on the issue. On the one hand, even with student discount, I would be paying as much for the OS as I am for the computer itself. But, the more obvious question is, what is the point of a mac without os x? Although I am something of a computer nerd, running linux and knowing that it is being executed on the power pc architecture versus IA-32 doesn't get me THAT excited... So yeah, I'll probably pick up a copy of OS X eventually.

if you want to run osx, you could always get an older version like 10.2 or 10.3. ebay seems to have a few for reasonable prices. i haven't used 10.0 and 10.1, but i've heard they weren't very good.

get 10.3 used from somewhere, it should be cheap and give you a good fix
-chris

Good call, I've been taking a peak around e-bay and panther seems to run 30-40, and tiger 40-50.

I've started doing a lot of research as far as what exactly I purchased (apparently apple released 6.02*10^23 different powermac G4's so I want to see exactly what it is I have). The "Digital Audio" revision is the only one which comes in a 466 MHz G4, so I assumed that's what it is. At first I thought "Digital Audio" was just the name of the motherboard OEM or something, but then I discovered it is apparently supposed to actually have a digital audio port. I'm just not seeing it...

In response to what dtravis7 was saying about upgradability, I have been able to find a crapload of CPU upgrade options. This thing was supposed to just be something to mess around with for a while untill I sell it on e-bay or give it to the parents as a gift (they have what amounts to a 333 MHz celeron with windows 98), but given the upgradability, it's going to be hard not to turn this into a a little pet project. 160 bucks for a 1 GHz G4, 100 for a decent 64 MB video card, 40 bucks for OS X, and 60 bucks to get a little more RAM in there, and I'd have one heck of a mac for under $500.

Too bad, ubuntu hoary didn't work either. Got a lot further than with Dapper, though. The live cd "installation" hangs when it starts setting up the live session. Guess I'll have to order a copy of OS X and then wait a week untill I can pick up a hard drive. Oh well, at least I can keep using this sleek and stylish mouse and keyboard with my dell laptop...

As far as adding wi-fi to this thing goes...

There's no way I'm buying an airport card; those things run around $100 and thats just absurd for a wireless adapter, and an outdated one (802.11b) at that. I've been poking around the forums and found that there are only a handful of PCI options that will work, one card with a similar chipset to airport, and a second which happens to have os x drivers. Have things changed (hopefully) since what I've been reading on the forums was posted, or am I doomed to either buy a long eithernet cable or drop $50 on the one PCI adapter with the similar chipset to airport?

I'm not exactly new to mac (had an ibook for a few months, work in a large lab with 700+ imac g5's), but this is definately my first experience with something that is both a mac AND a fully customizeable tower. So, in that regard, I'll probably be asking a lot of questions relating to the hardware side of things as I consider shaping this guy for the 21st century.

That is strange as I still have that CD and it boots in every G4 I have here including a DA like you have.