I need some SERIOUS Mac OS X help...(the computer runs fine, though)

[jmowreader]

I recently got a little freelance work, and made a nice sum of money. Ah good, thought I, time to really pump up the $25 G3 that's sitting under my desk right now. I figured that some more RAM and a nice roomy hard drive would make my work much easier.

I got the RAM. One 256MB stick. Now it's sitting at 384MB and running nicely.

Then came the hard drive. This is a Revision A G3. Their IDE controllers don't see anything past 128GB, and you can't get a drive that small in Fayetteville. (I got the little one, and it's a 160.) They also don't like to run dual hard drives, and I do. Hence...I gotta get another controller.

And if I really need another controller, why not go all the way and get a Serial ATA controller? You can get 'em for ancient Macs like mine. I bought a "Koutech Systems" controller, which is based on the Silicon Image Sil3512 SATA chipset. The Mac can't see it because, according to the book, this controller supports "Windows, Linux and Novell Netware." (I didn't even know anyone RAN NetWare anymore!)

Off I go to the Internets. There appears to be a CardBus controller for PowerBooks that uses the chipset in question and runs in Mac OS X 10.2, which is my OS version. I tried downloading and installing it, but apparently there's a CardBus directory I don't have...no joy.

Then I ran into a "NetBSD" forum. It seems that the BSD community has figured out how to talk to the Sil3512 chipset, and they've got a driver that's running in NetBSD and FreeBSD. They distribute it as compilable source...and I've got a Mac OS X compiler, which I keep for nostalgia's sake--the nostalgia of old Unixes that made you recompile the fucking OS every time you made a change to your setup.

Remembering that way down below all the pretty Mac OS X is BSD, is it possible to take this source, compile it for my blue box and run my new hard drive? And if so, how?

[Whoa_Nelly]

1. Maybe someone in the DU Mac forum can help you out :-)

X-post this here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=233

[petronius]

2. You need to jigger the thingummy

Hope that helps...

:)

[jmowreader]

3. Yes I do.

But I need a driver to do it.

[CatholicEdHead]

4. If it is an beige G3, OS X never was able to run on it

It had to be the blue and white ones or starting from the first Bnodi Blue iMac.

[jmowreader]

5. It's a blue-and-white

It's a "Revision A" Yosemite, which has short addressing on the IDE controller. You get 128GB max, and drives don't come that short in Fayetteville.

I figure I'll build me a nice spiffy box for not a lot of money, make some coin with it, then add a Mac Pro, a serious laser printer, and an upgraded copy of QuarkXPress to my lineup. I still need this machine, though; some of the programs I like a lot won't run on the Mac Pro. Fontographer is an absolute requirement in my work, and it's not OS X compliant. Neither is the old LetraStudio. I don't use it much because I don't distort much type, but when you NEED to distort type, ain't nothin' better.

Scanners...I want this...real bad...

http://www.bob-weber.com/showphoto.asp?uploadID=1171

This is a Linotype-Hell Chromagraph S3900 drum scanner. Only $13,000--a steal when you figure that when it was new it was a quarter-million-dollar scanner.

I would also LOVE to have the Screen SG-737 drum. Now...that scanner is fucking awesome because it doesn't use a light bulb to illuminate the work--it contains three lasers. Screen (the prepress arm of Dainippon Screen Manufacturing Company, which started out making screenprinting equipment and still does) still makes drum scanners, and they will make you the eight proprietary parts in this scanner (the four gas lasers, the three photomultiplier tubes, and the controller card) if yours go bad. The rest of the parts in it are straight off-the-shelf components. These scanners make images you don't have to fuck with in Photoshop--which is good because in the day, a lot of guys didn't even have the 737 hooked to a computer. They scanned directly to separation negatives. If you've seen negs straight off a 737 compared with negs from Photoshop, you'd see a night-and-day difference. Seps directly off the 737 fuckin' GLOW, man, they're beautiful in a way seps run through Photoshop could never be.

You will never see an "Extreme Photoshop Makeover" video featuring images off a 737. Most of those "extreme" videos are nothing but color correction anyway. On the 737, or the S3900, you can correct the color in the scanner, in hardware, BEFORE you scan the image, and with far more control than Photoshop or your flatbed driver give you.

[ghostsofgiants]

6. Get a PC.

:evilgrin: