It's the Simple Things : iBook + Appletalk

Spent most of today installing Jaguar onto a 300MHz tangerine iBook as a favor to a friend, who had been running OS9. She'd been holding off on upgrading until they could get the Office vX suite cheap, and since they were able to pick it up for $5 from their uni and I was in the area, we set to it.

Took a lot longer than I anticipated, even though we had a high speed connection for updates... mostly because of just how slow the CD drive is in that machine, and the speed of the disk and subsystem in general.

Some observations:

Memorable Design
The toilet-seat iBook design is just much more memorable compared to Apple's current designs, IMHO. There's a feeling of having little aestetics throughout it for the sake of aesthetics, that don't hurt functionality whatsoever (ok, size could be one thing). Just a guess, but the design of this thing will be something people remember 10 years now, like the Blackbird or Wallstreet Powerbooks, whereas the current snow-iBook and iMac will most likely fade from memory.
Forward-thinking components
I honestly don't know what the hell Apple was smoking when they not only said these machines were made for OSX back when they sold them, when you consider the bus/component speed and the resolution. The video card is a joke, as well as the bus speed... The CPU with enough RAM actually isn't too bad for OSX, but the other parts of it just drag down performance.
800x600
OSX is barely usable at any resolution under 1024x768, and with the iBook's 800x600 resolution, and very poor graphics performance (ie, don't try hiding/unhiding the dock) it makes for a painful experience. There's just so much screen real estate wasted it sort of rubs me the wrong way. Even in the setup screens for OSX, or the preference panes, they actually go off the screen or run under the dock no matter how small it is. Most of Apple's notebooks still ship with very low resolutions compared to PC's, and PC's don't need the resolution nearly as much as Mac users do... Apple's margin's are high enough that it can increase the resolutions to match the PC makers, as it's a bit sad right now.
Standard Formats
Way too much of my time was spent dealing with their legacy email, which was in Outlook Express. It's a good app, but getting anything out out of it in a format that other mail readers on OSX could deal with was an exercise I'm just not in the mood to relate. Note to self- when at all possible, avoid proprietary solutions or formats. They make dealing with legacy data/solutions a bitch.
Severe stability issues are worrisome
Two machines, both running 10.2.4 were connected via a hub for file sharing. Worked like a charm, until everything was done copying to the host machine and I shut down file sharing. Got the standard message "xxx will shut down in xxx minutes" goes fine. Cept the host machine went bonkers- finder hung with 100% usage, so I relaunched it. Hung on relaunch, then hung up the dock and froze the whole screen... i was able to SSH into the machine and kill of processes but it wasn't to helpful considering the GUI had gone all wacko, and all my work was within GUI apps. Not a happy camper. No offense, but a server disconnecting should not hang the client machine... it's not the first time it's happened.
Beer is good
I like wine. I like stimulating conversation. I like languid conversation. I like to partake of them together... but a situation like this calls for Beer. Beer not only makes the sitting around waiting while the HD drones during installation/copying tolerable, but with the right people actually allows it to pass tolerable and become enjoyable. Wouldn't have been with wine- situation called for beer.

Off again tomorrow morning, one more stop and I'm on a flight home... Waiting for a server to update, then catching up on email and then catching up on sleep. I talked to a server admin once who had never actually admin'd a server remotely. Half the servers I work on I've never actually seen... foreign to me.