Oh well, I couldn't resist. I erased my Games partition and installed Mac OS 9.1 on it. It's a standard installer and I just went with the defaults. Mac OS X runs with a full copy of Mac OS 9.1, which is nice. Then I ran the Mac OS X installer. Restart and boot off of the CD, after what seemed like an eternity the installer comes up (the Mac OS X installation disk boots up into Mac OS X) all nice and pretty. Not too many choices for installation: system language and keyboard, then you can install everything or customize. I looked at customize and there were only four packages that you could install or not install, two required (Core services and something else) so you can't unselect them and two others (BSD Subsystem and something else). No further customizing is possible, which is not a bad thing since it is a complex beastie.

So I selected the Mac OS 9.1 partition and installed Mac OS X. Installation took about 15 minutes, then it either restarted or asked me the setup questions immediately (I'm doing this from memory). TCP/IP settings and Internet settings and do you have an iTools account or do you want to have one set up for you? Also you have to fill out the registration which goes to Apple over the Internet (since I was behind a firewall it failed, wonder if it will try again when I next boot up Mac OS X?).

Eventually you end up in the Finder. So pretty, so very pretty. And fast too. I only used it for a few minutes, and didn't start Classic, but window dragging was smooth (and full window, not just an outline), I opened up a few control panels and it was all fast. Faster than Mac OS X Public Beta on my other PowerBook, though that machine is about half as fast as this one. Certainly I didn't experience any slowdowns, though we'll see as I explore further.

The Classic Control Panel allows you to start Classic with all extensions off, probably the way it should be. It also allows you to start Classic as soon as you log in, rebuild the desktop database, and a few other options that I forgot. Startup Disk allowed me to select from Mac OS 9.0 on one partition or either Mac OS 9.1 or Mac OS X on the second partition. Quite handy. I heard that you can boot up with the option key held down and it will ask you what partition you want to boot from, though I couldn't get that to work.

Anyway, I had to get back to work so I set the Startup Disk to Mac OS 9.0 and restarted. Once in Mac OS 9.0 I experience a couple of crashes. Palm Desktop would start on crash and I think I had another crash. I finally did a full shut down and boot up and that solved my crashing problems. Naturally Mac OS 9.0 Startup Disk can't choose what system to boot up, only partitions. I hear that the Mac OS 9.1 Startup Disk gives you more options, but you can't run it with Mac OS 9.0. We'll see if I can get back into Mac OS X without first booting up into Mac OS 9.1, or even at all.

What else. Mac OS X moved all the Mac OS 9 applications into an "Applications (Mac OS 9)" folder. Handy so you know where all the old applications are. Mac OS 9.1 did install everything, including Netscape and Internet Explorer and all the standard control panels and utilities. All in all a promising start.

As long as I have lots of journal entries to write and since I'm starting to use Mac OS X, I thought I would give my spin on things. This is not going to be a "what are all the features" type of thing. I'm more concerned about what's installed with Mac OS X and what applications I can install to replace the Mac OS 9 versions. So I'm trying to find out just how "native" I can go with Mac OS X, without spending a huge amount of money on upgrades and such.

Another goal is to test the Classic applications that I still need to make sure that they work. I do not want to dual boot just to use some applications. So if, say Virtual PC doesn't work in Classic (which it doesn't, it being such a low level application) I want to know before go total Mac OS X without a safety net. The last goal is to install and configure a web, mail, and domain name server. That way I'll have the experience so that when I upgrade my server machine (which has to be a format/install since Mac OS X has to be installed within the first 8 GB of a HD on older machines) it can be done in a few hours instead of a few days.