Blue, 4:20 p.m. Tuesday Hawai'i time •
-can I dual boot with Leopard and Linux? It will prolly be Mepis or Kubuntu (Debian derivative distros)
i believe you can in uniX protected mode, presuming you have enough R A M and such
-is there any advantage to buying from the Apple store or buying on-line?
on-ine you might be able to get a better deal on an extended waranttee. .and all the free offers they throw in
.. although it's difficult to drop an iMac®.. lol . warrantee . . .printers the SIMS® software, etc.
While you're deciding what to do .. download Tinkertool® from France and start fooling around with it if you haven't tried it already
Screw around with the Startup options to see what happen B 4 a mac® even starts up and what it's doing when it shuts down, too
. .it's worth the 20 Euro or whatever it costs, now . h t h ∞ mactechtribe
Hardware Overview:

Machine Name: PowerBook G4 17"
Machine Model: PowerBook5,1
CPU Type: PowerPC G4 (3.3)
Number Of CPUs: 1
CPU Speed: 1 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 256 KB
L3 Cache (per CPU): 1 MB
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 167 MHz
Boot ROM Version: 4.6.2f1

You most certainly can dual boot Mac OS and Linux. You'll have to Google around, but there's lots of useful info out there on the subject. Also, you may want to look into running linux in a virtual environment. I use VMWare Fusion and run Xubuntu on my MacBook Pro. It's a dream.

The only reason I can think of to go with the online Apple store is if you want a custom set up. If you want to add extra ram or HD space internally, ie.

Have you looked into MacPorts or Fink? Both are GNU-app package projects for OSX.

I bought a 24" Mac about two years ago and I am really disappointed with it.

I can't email from the damn thing, except from web-based email accounts. To email from this machine I have to buy a monthly subscription to a macmail account. That involves starting yet another account which I have to check for emails on a regular basis, and paying the Apple company for something I don't really want. Hold a gun at my head if you want my money, at least I'll agree to hand it over. If you want an inbuilt email system in a Mac you have to pay a fee, and you don't find out about this until after you've started using the damned thing.

I bought a new operating system, Leopard, at an additional cost of about $180 and that stopped the freezing that I experienced daily with OS10 or whatever it was called.

I bought this Mac with a view to keeping my photos on it, as I am a keen digital photographer. The damn iPhoto program not only imported all my photos, some 35000 of them, but it made duplicate copies while doing so. I had to download third party software and spend a week of night cleaning up my photo gallery.

When I want to attach some photos to an email, I have to make copies of the image and then reduce them from 3 or 4 megapixels to an email-friendly file size, then attach them one by one to a web-based email. This Apple company hasn't heard of Picasa, which works only on a PC, Apple don't seem to have an equivalent. Picasa allows me to do basic photo editing functions such as contrast and colour correction and cropping, then automatically reduces the whole selected batch to a pre-set size, in my case around 100kb seems fine, then emails the batch from either Outlook, my regular email program, or Gmail a really good web-based email program. Doing this same thing on my Mac takes four times as long.

I can't get these failings past the thick heads of Apple fans, they are all so defensive of their Macs that they can't consider that the PC has a superior operating system. I have a Sony Vaio which I would rather use anytime compared to my near-useless Mac. The Mac cost me nearly $4000 with software, the Sony about $2700. I love the Sony and just absolutely hate this f*****ing Mac. I can't think of anything I have purchased which has been a bigger disappointment

Beware the advertising hype that surrounds Apple and is propagated by Mac users. This is the Edsel of computers.

As someone so famously said (and got shouted down for saying so) my Mac is a piece of shit and yours will be too. Repent before its too late. These might be good for school kids to play with, but if you want to work with one, I think you'll be sorry

Bill (Sydney, Australia)