Right now i've got my 120 gig firewire drive formatted with HFS+ and would like to use my 9600/200MP as a file server. Any ideas on how I could do this? Will 10.0 or 10.1 run on the 9600? I've tried 10.2 and yellow dog but neither would install, although yellowdog should work...

Any ideas or suggestions? Thanks

9.2 should fly on that machine, but I think you need a hack to install OS 10.X even then you might want a G3 or G4 pci card, as well as better video and USB-good thing that Mac has lots of slots!
Think carefully about how much you want to invest in a 7 year old machine. If you can find the parts used and cheap then that's great but, you just might decide to be happy with a fast OS9 machine, and live with that

If memory serves me correctly, OS9.1 is the last OS that will install on this model without fiddling around. You can install 9.2 or 9.2.2 by using a program called OS9 Helper (downloaded off the net for free). OSX will not run well on a 9500. You'd want to upgrade the processor to a G3 or G4 PCI card (need a patch to install OSX with some or all of these cards), bump up the RAM and install an OSX compatible video card. Stick with OS9 or get a fast G3 or G4 tower if you need to run OSX.

[ November 16, 2004, 09:43 PM: Message edited by: Peter Scharman ]

You can install 10.1 on your machine with XPostFacto. Jaguar and Panther require at least a G3 processor, so you're out of luck there unless you buy an upgrade card.

OS9.1 works fine, you don't really need to fool around with the OS9.2 hack.

If you use OS9 make sure you enable file sharing via TCP/IP in the File Sharing control panel. Or better yet, see if you can find a copy of AppleShare that includes IP.

Take a look at the OS9 Helper site and see if there's any advantage for you. The programmer lists the advantages of OS 9.2 over 9.1

But since you're using a 200 Mhz CPU there may not be any advantage in using OS9. I personally found OS 8.6 a better choice on my older Macs. Used less RAM, loaded faster and seemed a lot more stable. A lot of OS9 seemed to be geared towards G3/G4 CPU's and Classic mode for OSX.

You can install 10.1 on your machine with XPostFacto.

i like the sounds of this line. All i want is to be able to run filesharing and printsharing the same as on my beige g3.

Although you can get OSX.1 to work, don't forget it is an orphaned bastard OS (not even Apple supports this turkey, they just tell you to upgrade). There are a lot more people still using OS9. You'll have better compatibility with OS9 and it will be much more stable than X.1.

Don't forget that any flavour of X needs a lot of memory. It's going to chug with only 128MB of ram. Just cause it can be installed doesn't mean it will work well.

I would try to see if you can make it work in OS9 first before you start pulling your hair out with X.1. OS9 has a ton of features that are well proven and stable. You should be able to get it to do the tasks you require.

I've got os 9 on there and it isnt much good for anything. i need it to be able to read that os x formatted firewire drive and be able to share it via ethernet.