Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Networking Mac OS 8.6 to OS 10.4.4...

...was a bit harder than it sounds. I was doing this for a friend of my barber, who needed his business moved to a G5 iMac (OS 10.4.4) from a beige PowerMacintosh G3 (OS 8.6). (The Intel iMacs do not run Classic applications; good thing he bought the G5.) I failed the first time, although I got everything else done, like fixing his DVD player and Sony Playstation setup, and installing Classic on his iMac G5. I found that the OS 8.6 Mac had no Firewire or USB; I needed an Ethernet crossover cable.

Also, I found a very helpful document referenced on the Apple discussion board on how to connect OS 9 to OS 10.3 with Ethernet. Minor changes to this for 8.6 and 10.4.4.

Also, on the OS 8.6 Mac, I had to make Ethernet show up in the TCP/IP and Appletalk Control Panels by turning on Apple Enet in Extensions Manager.

Also, OS 10.4.4 cannot see OS 8.6, but OS 8.6 can see OS 10.4.4. I made the connection from OS 8.6. (I turned on File Sharing in Extension Manager, and then turned on File Sharing, but since I was on OS 8.6 looking at 10.4.4, I bet that I did not need 8.6 File Sharing turned on.)

Also, the password on the iMac had to be 8 characters or less, since OS 8.6 did not understand a longer password. We had to shorten that.

Also, well, then I made the connection. It felt pretty good, considering that this is a connection few people make. It was not trivial.

I installed the Classic apps he wanted and moved all his data (I believe I got all his old email data moved; he now gets email on the iMac). He had a customized version of FileMaker; it ran fine under Classic. His Quicken files run OK under the Quicken supplied with OS 10.4. I must say that Apple did a good job on the PowerPC OS X Macs to get Classic apps to run.

One chunk of data remains: his Palm desktop. His Palm III has no USB. Looks like a job for special cables; I did this with a Palm III clone. I better hurry; the power button on his Palm III is badly cracked.

Another also: He had me reduce his iMac screen resolution to 800x600 (ugh), since he likes his old apps to look big. But I showed him how to increase his resolution again.

ALSO, he will now say nice stuff about me. That's always nice.

P.S. Now he does not have to have the SCSI hard drive on his OS 8.6 Mac yanked out. Yes, that is how some places transfer old apps and data.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am looking forward to seeing more reports from it before. What you said was news to me, I′ll tell you.Thanks!