Opera web browser also supports favicons: AJH reports that favicons are supported in Opera as well. For those that don't know, favicons are little icons that can appear next to your web sites URL in web browsers or in their book mark section. Apple's new Safari web browser supports these but not many other Mac browsers. Thanks for the info AJH.

[I noticed your mention of the favicon.ico feature of Apple's new Safari browser and I thought it might interest you to know that the new release of Opera 6.0 for the Mac (www.opera.com) also implements it; I'm not sure if any previous versions do, but I was quite surprised to see the little 6400 Zone icon in the page tabs. Particularly interesting since, though Microsoft has announced that no new versions of IE will be released for OS9 or below, Opera is still updated and continues to support OS8.6.

AJH]

Mac Driver Museum: Alec sent me a link to the Mac Driver Museum which has many drivers for older Mac equipment. Thanks Alec.

[I found the Sonic Systems drivers while looking for a Farallon one. They are in the network section of the Mac Driver Museum site along with a load of others. It's www.macdrivermuseum.com/network.shtml and look for Sonic Systems, or whatever else you desire.]

Update on OSX and the 6400: Josh sends word that he had similar issues to me while trying to install OSX on a B&W G3 with a Radeon 7000 card installed. It seems you need an older ATI card to work as only OSX 10.2 has native support for the Radeon 7000. Thanks Josh

[I had a similar problem as you with 10.0 and a PCI Radeon 7000 in my B&W G4/450...installer kept quitting. I suggest finding a rage 128. ..this fixed my problem lickety-split. Also, you can go to www.ati.com:80/support/drivers/mac/macos-october-2002-update.html to nab the latest drivers for OS X. Radeon 7k if you want to work on support for that.

-Josh]

OSX does work on a 6400 with an older video card installed!: Eric was able to install OSX up to 10.1.5 (the latest that works on older Macs) by using an old IX3D video card. Thanks for the info Eric.

[Just wanted to let you know that I got OS X (10.1.5) running reliably on my brothers 6400 (Apple Performa 6400/200) using the patched XPostFacto and more or less following the steps outlined by the earlier letter written by Samy (although nothing wanted to boot up at first, and I had to press the internal reset switch before I could get anything to boot up after the install).

The computer has an ix3D card for its display (XPostFacto had to have its "output-device" option set appropriately to get the display to the right place, but once set it was fine) and has 136 MB of RAM. It has an ethernet card in is Comm. II slot (not sure of the brand, but it's just conventional slow ethernet, not one of the Farallon fast ethernet cards and a combo USB / Firewire card (one of the fireLINE cards from Evergreen) as well as a Sonnet Crescendo card.

First off, OS X itself is solid as a rock. The combo USB / Firewire card seems to work fine (I only tested it with Firewire drives though, which automatically mounted without difficulty) and I even got the floppy drive to work by way of the experimental alpha driver available at http://www.darwin-development.org/floppy/ and generally speaking the system just works (albeit slowly). I even fired up Classic for the fun of it (and it made its changes to the OS 9 system folder without a hitch) not that I'd ever expect it to be used. There are, however, a couple of show stoppers.

The first is that the Sonnet card isn't recognized. OS 10.1.5 is SLOW on a 6400 without the upgrade (it is probably significantly better with the "High Performance Module" installed, but of course you can't have both the HPM and Sonnet Crescendo in the machine at the same time and so I didn't test this). It's not possible to upgrade to 10.2 (which may or may not be faster) since 10.2 requires a G3, and the 6400 without a recognized Sonnet card doesn't have a G3.

The second is that the ethernet card isn't recognized. Running X, this machine becomes incapable of connecting to the Internet with its current hardware (and since both its PCI slots are used up, it doesn't have the option of a PCI ethernet card). The various upgrades to get from 10.1 to 10.1.5 had to be downloaded via OS 9 and then later installed manually.

Anyhow, these two big problems are enough to make my brother stick with OS 9. Hopefully XPostFacto (or Sonnet for that matter) will add X support for the Crescendo card, and hopefully someone (either on the Darwin team or with XPostFacto) will add support for Comm. II ethernet... With these two things in place I don't doubt that this 6400 will run 10.2 at least as fast as some of the "supported" machines.

Keep on hacking,
Eric]

So it is possible but the old question "Is it really worth it?" comes back. If you need to utilize one PCI slot for a video card and most all new peripherals need USB or Firewire which will take up your second slot, then how do you get networking? It appears the COMM II slot is not recognized which makes sense since no OSX supported Mac has one. USB modems probably work and I suppose if you have another Mac with Firewire that is connected to the internet, you could try using a TCP over Firewire kit but that requires your Mac to be relatively close together and buying the kit. PCI ethernet cards will work but then you lose USB and Firewire. I suppose a 6400 OSX server would be OK since you only need the GUI to setup the server. Once running, you log out and it all runs in the background.

Closeout on 6400/6500 upper bay drive kits: ProLine is closing its doors on Feb. 14th and will no longer be selling drive kits for older Macs. If you want to get a kit, I suggest you hurry on over while they have some. Prices are very low right so now is the best time to buy! Once they close, there will be no place to buy a new kit that I know of? You should still be able to find used kits from the Mac resellers though.

Update on USB drivers and floppy drive issues: John writes that he was able to fix his floppy drive issues by updating to the current Carbon Library extension and current USB drivers. Thanks John.

[I remember you from the floppy disk issue days. Well the USB device and support extensions, plus Carbon lib 1.6 has eliminated the issue. When I wish to use USB, the floppy disk drive works great, not perfect like it does with USB off.]

Basically if you also update to OS 9.2.2 you will get the latest of these as well. This brings up a little issue I just had the other day with my new schooling. Oh, I forgot to tell you all I am going to a local college for an MS Networking Technology Certificate. Yeah I know its the dark side but I need to get a job and I love networking computers. There isn't enough demand in my area for Mac jobs so I went the other way. I'll be fine, they can't corrupt me :) Anyway I am taking a DOS class now and it requires a floppy disk to hold my school work. This means I can't use it at home because I don't have any floppy drives anymore! Well my 6400 does but it is not on my network and I don't feel like going from floppy to ZIP and then to network it over to my Dual 800 that has Virtual PC on it. I came up with a clever solution though. At school I can reboot to WinXP and then make a compressed folder and email that to myself. Then open it up at home and move the contents to a floppy disk image. Then in VPC while booted to DOS I can access the data as if it was a real floppy. A round about way to do it but it works.

Its kind of fun telling my class mates that I am an avid Mac user. They all get a little laugh out of it but I just sit back and smile to myself when everyone is having such a hard time figuring out DOS and XP when if they had Macs, they would be cruising along :)

Even my XP teacher thinks the PC past up the Mac when Win95 came out! She could not bring up one point why though where I had all kinds of stories as to why I don't like any PC operating systems. I think just having more software must make them think their OS is better? Does that make Betamax better then VHS? No. Does that make USB 2 better then Firewire? No. I think we are on a comeback and I would love to see the day when they are teaching OSX Server in colleges right along side Microsofts stuff.

Sonnets 2.0.2 Crescendo driver causes bootup problems with a 6500: Stone had no issues with his Sonnet G3 until he upgraded the drivers to version 2.0.2. Then it wouldn't boot anymore! Reverting to an older driver worked fine. Thanks for the info Stone.

[I decided to finally upgrade my 6500/ G3 400 up to 9.2.2. Before I upgraded though, I decided to upgrade the software of the Sonnet upgrade card to the most recent 2.0.2 (or something like that). Big Mistake! While the computer worked flawlessly before, now it won't load up past the sonnet extension, and I get a bomb with either an error type 10, or a bus error message. Also, no matter what I do, I can't get the sonnet extension to load first anymore. It actually loads second now, after what looks like an ethernet extension, but I am not sure. (Yes, I changed the name of sonnet to several things to try to get this work, to no avail).

So now, I wold just be happy to downgrade the extension back to whatever it was before, which I don't remember, but it was lower than 2.0.2. Does anyone have the extension they could send me, or know where to get it? Thanks!

Stone]

Later he wrote:

[Well, after I wrote my message, I looked at sonnet's website again, and there is a software archive, where I found old drivers. I downgraded to 2.0 (I had been at 1.4.7 before all the trouble), and everything works like a charm again. So apparently, it was indeed the 2.0.2 drivers that were causing all the troubles. I didn't even bother to change types in resedit. Now that it works again, I'll just leave it alone

Stone]

I actually have some of Sonnets older drivers posted as well.