recom. OS for old 233 IMAC

[alecmcmahon]

i found an old imac on the side of the road the other day waiting for the garbage man to come toss it away, so i picked it up.


booted up just fine, it's an orange imac 233mhz, 32mb ram, 6mb video card, 6 gig hard drive.

i think its like os 8.x on there right now, i'd like to get an new OS on there if possible.

i doubt OS X will run?

how about some version of linux? any recommendations?

should i try to get os 9? any improvments?

any other options?

thanks

 

[classof2011]

I think that it should run OS 9, but definitely not OS X.

The minimum required specs can be Googled for.

 

[kalisphoenix]

It won't run Tiger. No Firewire. Too little RAM. It'd be friggin' painful anyway.

It's too limited for most Linuxen, imho, even a CLI version. Ubuntu (server install) might be good. Or OS 9, even though it's obsolete. I'd definitely recommend dropping a couple bucks on RAM from eBay or here -- at least 512MB. That'd make it a perfectly decent box for a simple Linux.

Edit: I hate OS 9. I hate running OS X on old hardware. So I'm biased.

 

[Daveway]

I would say stick to OS 8.5 actually. OS 9 if you can max out your ram.

 

[negatv1]

if you put some ram in it, you 'could' run(walk?) a relatively modern version of OSX. I have an old blue slot load iMac running 10.3, but it has 768mb ram, and I threw in a larger hard disk in it as well.

It's still not fast(or very usable) by any means, but it works.