[ixus_123]

I own an old indigo iBook that has the following specs:

366mhz G3
320mb RAM
c. 9GB Hard Disk (noisy - overheated it years ago using it on a heat wicking mattress - but still works).

os X is virtually unusable on it due to the 800x600 resolution. I did try Ubuntu on it with XFCE desktop & that was nice & fast but again I don't really care for the limited screen resolution any more.

I don't want to get rid of the computer - instead I'd like to get Linux (Ubuntu) back on it & use it for something.

I was wondering if there were any suggestions?

I deally I'd like to run a LAMP setup with Wordpress blogging software & Gallery2 to handle photos. Do you think it would be fast enough to run these - bearing in mind the ram & 4200rpm hard disk.

Any other possible uses? Proxie / mail server?

I have a main PC running Ubuntu Dapper & a mini-itx N10k, 512mb, 160gb also on Ubuntu acting as a blog server.

I'd rather keep teh ibook over the itx box as it is smaller & has screen & keyboard included - the only limiting factor is hard disk space & cpu speed but I just read an article about someone webhosting on a Lisa!
MacMod.com - Your Mac Modification HQ - Lisa still going strong, used as server

Any tips / suggestions welcome - thanks

[TheoCryst]

You could always sell it to me... I've been thinking about picking up a Clamshell for a while now.

Other than that, I'm pretty much idea-less, sorry. Don't know much about servers.

[dowNNshift]

If you want to make your own webserver, you could run SWSoft Plesk 8. They make a Ubuntu and Mac OS X 10.4 workstation PPC versions. Its a self inclusive suite, complete with Apache, Firewall, BIND DNS, and more.

Food for thought.... www.swsoft.com

[ixus_123]

YjeCryst - I have to admit it's a tough old book. I've overheated & ther hard drive crapped out & took out a load of files but the system still ran. This was due to using in bed so teh heat had no where to escape to.

I've also dropped it numerous times & spilt tea over it more than once & it still works.

I can't fault teh machine apart from teh screen resolution - if it had 1024*768 I'd still use it as a desktop machine.

One point to note if you are after a clamshell is that airport cards for them are like gold dust & go for more than new on ebay.

DowNNshift, I had a look at PLESK but it doesn't appear to be free / GPL - I quite like the idea of building something for nothng. I couldn't really nderstand what PLESK is but it looks like a front end to the common services like Apache etc. I think there is a program called "webmin" that does this & it's free, also there is PHPmyadmin which is a great front end to MySQL database.

I just jug out my Ubuntu PPC shipit install disk (for some reason my iBook wouldn't boot the images I burt from any PC / program).

I'm going to try & fire it up by the weekend & will report back.

[dimmer]

It'll work fine as a web server / eMail server / DNS server and maybe even some light SQL duties. As a file server, it'll be a little pokey, but it'll still work. If you put it on the web, you'll want to keep up to date with the security updates (but what doesn't that apply too?). I don't know if the clamshell will run with the screen closed (I think it auto-sleeps in OS X, with Linux who knows?) - but it's kinda a no cost option whatever you do, so have at it.

[ixus_123]

Well the good news is that it's up & runnign with wordpress installed.

Kieren’s Website

the bad news is that I had teh desktop edition & there was no option on this CD, as there were in the past, to just install a base system. The installer also crashed everytime I tried to use a file system other than ext3. I would have like to use XFS or RieserFS - more likely XFS especially as teh battery on the iBook acts as a UPS or sorts.

I also had a problem manually installling a yaboot boot partition - I couldn't get it to recognise one with a manuual partitioning scheme so I had to go for auto- install which doesn't have a good partion schemeat all.

It does seem quite snappy considering my upload speed & the slow hard drive & file system don't appear to be a bottleneck, however I'm sure performance will degrade once I add a gallery of some sort which will impact disk & memory.

CD's I burn refuse to boot on my iBook (not an uncommon problem) so I have to wait for shipit version to arrive. In the mean time &'m going to play around with the setup to get it the way I like.

All I have to do now is stop it from going to sleep when I close the lid

[ixus_123]

For the record it's chugging along quite nicely.

I was advised not to shut the lid due to heat dissipation issues so I abandoned that quest.

The latest (Efty Edge) Ubuntu boots up fine on it no problem from CD - that's as far as I went but I might install that & resize teh partitions in the new year