Well, I did it... I installed Panther on our Summer 2001 iMac. In fact, I am using Safari (for the very first time) to access Techsurvivors.
The installation went surprisingly smothly. I had to do the write-zeros thing prior to installing because a previously installed security program maintains a "sentry" at the driver level and so everything had to go, or the Mac would lock-up after installing OS X, with disastrous consequences and a troublesome fix that involves removing the harddrive...doesn't that sound like fun?
The only glitch I ran into is my Linksys wireless router went hinky after I turned-off WEP encryption. Somehow, after installing OS 9 prior to OS X, the iMac connected without asking for the WEP key, which is kinda mysterious. Then, after disabling WEP encryption I could not access the Linksys control panel from the iMac or my iBook, plus the Airport kept dropping its connection and, when it was connected, showed only two dots in the signal strength CSM, even though the iBook was about five feet from the router. The Linksys would not accept my log-in information, which makes it rather difficult to make changes!
So I did a bunch of things and finally reset the router, and things are back to normal...I'll mess with the WEP key later.
Installing Panther took about 20 minutes, thanks to the advice from the Tidbits Panther installation e-book, where I found out what to install and what to ignore, and which made my Panther installation about 1.5 GB. It's nice to be able to install only what you want, especially when working with a 20GB drive with three partitions.
So while I am trying to find my way around Panther (no doubt more questions to come...) I have one mystery on my hands:
Where The Heck Is Appleworks?
It isn't on any of the Panther install CDs (or I couldn't find it...)
And will I be able to move my old AW templates into the new AW, or will I have to create new templates?
I guess that I am off to Mail to see how it compares to Eudora...
