[kahlan]

Good-day Everyone,

I just bought a used ibook clamshell on-line. Thought it would be a good way to try out a
Mac (Window user for 8 yrs. and tired of dealing with all the crap that goes with it) and see why all you Mac users swear by it. So here's the problem. It came with Mac OS 9 on it, as well as disks for 9.1, 9.2, 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2.

I thought I would try the 9.1 first, because I'm unfamiliar with how the Mac upgrades. Also I took out some books at the library to help me out. Anyway I started the install and used the perform clean install option and everything went fine. However at the end of the install I wasn't prompted to restart the computer, so I referred to the book and went to start/restart. The computer restarted (saw happy mac) and waited for the Mac OS setup asstistant to start...it didn't...the book said if it didn't I should launch it by opening the Mac
OS Setup Assistant icon in the Assistants folder on my hard disk, (I looked on the hard drive, maybe they meant on the cd...hmmm) anyway, when I didn't find it I went to take the cd out, but the start/eject didn't work, so I tried the key commands, that didn't work, and lastly I tried to drag the disk icon to the trash, still no luck. Oh and I did try the conventional windows way by pressing the button on the side of the cd player, nothng!

I'm not sure what to do next and was hoping some of you advanced Mac users could give me some help. (I did test the cd drawer before all this with a music cd and it opened and closed with no problem)

Thanks in advance!
Kahlan

[seanc]

Hi,

The cd drawer may be catching on somthing, so check there are not little things under it that could be stopping it. Try ejecting the cd by dragging it to the bin on the desktop... I assume the cd is shown on the desktop.... If it is sucessful the cd should disappear and the drawer should pop out. If you stil can't eject the cd restart and after the start-up tone hold down the mouse/trackpad button until it ejects.

The mac os setup assistant is in 'Your HDD' > Applications > Utilities > Assistants > Mac OS Setup Assistant.

Don't use mac os 9.1 to get used to mac os. 10.2 is quite different, but in a good way, and the upgrade process is different too (quite windows like in my opinion). When you get the time install 10.2, it's a lot better and more stable than os 9.... that's because it's built on UNIX! The next step would be to get 10.4!

Oh and another quite obvous reason for the cd not ejecting is the fact that you may still be booting from it. Somtimes the mac detects that first! If you're booting from cd the setup assistant won't come up and you won't be able to eject the cd. If you are booting from the cd the background will be pale yellow with CD embossed into it.... i think.
Hold down the mouse button to eject on start-up or alternatively go to apple menu > control panels > start-up disk. Then select the hard drive and it should boot from the HDD (the background should be a turquoise colour with vertical squigals in it.)

Hope this helps you, once you install mac os 10.2 you will see the difference like I did. I stopped using mac's during the reign of 8.5 and when I came back to them and used OS X it was a big difference but a very welcome one (STABILITY!!!!)

Sean

[kahlan]

Hi Seanc, I don't have my ibook booted right now, (trying to eat lunch and make an appt.) but I remember the embossed cd's in background. Thanks for the help! Also, I do plan to get it up to 10.2, but wonder what would be the best sequence to do that. I read or saw somewhere that you should be at 9.2 before upgrading to 10.2 to play classic programs or some such thing? Any advise on that would be great! I have a feeling I will be coming back here quite often as I will be installing an airport card also.


Thanks Again!

[seanc]

Hi kahlan,

Classic games don't really work to well in "classic mode" Depending on the size of your hard drive, I think it would be good to partition it into 2. This way you can run 9.2 on one partition to play classic games to their full potential, and the other to run os x 10.2. I assume that like 10.3 classic mode is installed, so just go the system preferences, and point the classic preferences to the 9.2 partition, yes you could just run os 9 programs in propper os 9 but by using classic mode you can run them from within os x.

You may find that there are not many programs available for os x 10.2 as it is quite old now and the same goes for os 9.

Never installed airport into a clamshell ibook - i've never owned one! The next good step would be to purchase a mac mini or ibook g4 if you decide to switch - which you should -- no Blue Screen of Death, just the occasional Spinning Beachball of Death if you have low ram or the hdd is failing but not as common as the BSOD, any program crashes can be ended in os x by alt - apple - esc, much like windows but in os x it actually works without crashing the whole system in the process!

If you upgrade to 10.3/4 (not sure about 10.2 but check the applications > utilities folder) you will come across X11. X11 allows you to make use of the unix base and run open source free programs, these include: Open Office, The Gimp etc.
There is a free java based version of Open Office for mac which means it doesn't need X11, it's called Neo Office http://www.neooffice.org/ It may not be as speedy as Microsoft Office but it's a good replacement and don't forget it's still being developed.
AppleWorks 6 ships with os x, I think, (it came with my ibook but may just be bundled software), so you can use that for word processing etc. You could also look into getting Iwork. This includes Pages - a word processing program and Keynote 2 - a presentation program. Check them out on apple's site.

Lunch? What country are you in? I've just had dinner, it's 7:10pm here in the UK

Sean