I just installed Tiger on my 266Mhz Wallstreet (320Mb RAM). I have to say it is a lot faster than i expected. I’ve been running MacOS X on the Wallstreet since 10.0, but only full-time since Jaguar (10.2) – the last officially supported version of MacOS X on this machine. Eventually, i installed Panther (10.3) using
Xpostfacto. It proved to be
much faster and
far more stable than Jaguar. The improvement was so dramatic, i wished i had done so a year earlier. Tiger seems to be every bit as fast as Panther and seems to support graphics acceleration which, ironically, the officially supported Jaguar does not. It shows every indication of being the best MacOS X choice for the Wallstreet. Also of note, i found that Spotlight doesn’t seem to bog down the system like i expected it would (other than for the initial indexing, which doesn’t last long). It should be noted that
Spotlight can be disabled using the
/etc/hostconfig method, if you feel you must.
There are those who say OS-9 is the only acceptable OS for this machine; that MacOS X is too slow on them. These people are wrong, especially if you’re running either Panther or Tiger (which are noticeably faster – and more stable – than Jaguar). Jaguar lacked graphics acceleration on the Wallstreet, so that made OS-9 feel faster. In truth, MacOS X outperforms OS-9 in disk related operations (e.g. opening files, writing, etc.), but was slower drawing menus, windows, etc. However, MacOS X is a more disk intensive OS, so a fast HD is really important. The stock Wallstreet HD is not nearly as good as an IBM Travelstar drive. (Note that there is
a magnetic shield issue with these drives.) When i installed a 20Gb Travelstar, it felt like i had doubled the speed of the machine. Also, i feel 320 Mb is the minimum RAM you would want to use with MacOS X on a Wallstreet; 512Mb would be better. I have heard it is possible to run up to 1Gb in the Wallstreet, even though Apple’s spec’s officially limit it 512Mb and most “authorities” cite this number. Processor (CPU) upgrades would not optimize a Wallstreet for MacOS X nearly as much as a fast HD and additional RAM would. 266Mhz is fine.
Since i have Tiger on DVD, and my Wallstreet lacks a bootable DVD drive, i chose to extract the Wallstreet’s internal HD, dropped it into an external FireWire enclosure, and connected it to a Mac mini to do the actual install. It sounds like Xpostfacto has an option to assist the booting of the install DVD from an external FireWire drive (with a FireWire CardBus card in the Wallstreet) using a helper partition on the HD, but that sounded more complicated than using the external FireWire enclosure i already had (however it would be safer in regards to the 8Gb limit discussed below). I chose to first erase my 6Gb boot partition in Disk Utility, selecting the Journaled option. [Note: Choosing the “case sensitive” filesystem proved to be a mistake as those can become invisible to OS-9 and various older disk utilities; ultimately, i erased the partition again and redid the install as a normal case insensitive (Journaled) drive.]
Since i had previously partitioned this HD with a boot partition
totally within the first 8Gb of the drive, i knew i was good-to-go on that account. Only a few Mac’s, including the Wallstreet, have an 8Gb limit, which basically boils down to this: Your MacOS X
boot partition must reside
entirely within the first 8Gb of the drive. You may have more than one boot partitions, but all must lie within the first 8Gb’s. MacOS 9 partitions may reside outside of this, or straddle it… as can data-only partitions… all of which may be mounted and used okay by MacOS X (they just can’t be used as a MacOS X boot volume). By using another Mac to install MacOS X, you must be careful as you can create a partition which does not conform to this requirement (if the installer is running on an affected machine, it will grey out non-eligible partitions, not allowing you to install on them). You may even be able to boot from a non-conforming installation on the Wallstreet, however if certain files lie (or get moved) beyond the 8Gb limit, you’re screwed. This is true not only of MacOS X, but virtually any other Unix (or Unix-like) OS installed on these machines. It seems to be a ROM-related issue.
Once installed, i returned the drive to the Wallstreet, booted off the separate (500Mb) OS 9 partition (which i maintain mostly for emergency purposes, such as disk repair), ran Xpostfacto4 and updated the boot files on the Tiger partition, then selected MacOS X and rebooted. Tiger booted up perfectly, ran the setup assistant, and i was in business.
I did notice that after System Updates, i sometimes had problems booting back into MacOS X. Two notes here: 1) Make sure to update the boot files from Xpostfacto after System Updates, and 2) sometimes the following two files get corrupted and hang the MacOS X boot process:
/System/Library/Extensions.mkext
/System/Library/Extensions.kextcache
Simply delete the files from OS-9 and boot back to MacOS X. If missing, the system will rebuild these files on startup.
I decided to write this down because a Google search found precious little on how to get Tiger going on a Wallstreet. Thought this might help someone else, so here it is! Enjoy.
Top