The first machine I tried to install my shiny new copy of Tiger onto was my Powerbook G3 Lombard (Bronze Keyboard). That's when I found out that Apple decided to remove my laptop from the list of supported installs.

Now I had only three options:

1. Stay with OSX 10.3.9,
2. Wait for XPostFacto to support Tiger, or
3. Find a workaround.

I chose door number 3.

I had just spent a large chunk of money on new memory and a larger hard drive only to find out that Apple's newest OS won't work. Some internet searching proved that the pre-releases of Tiger did work with the Lombard Powerbooks, so my belief was that Apple just changed the installer to exclude my favorite computer. I was correct. Here is how I was able to install OSX 10.4 on my Powerbook G3 Lombard.

1. Attach an external hard drive to the laptop (I have a PCMCIA firewire card so I used a firewire drive, but I imagine a USB drive would work, too.)
2. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to place a copy of the laptop hard drive onto the external drive.
3. Move the external drive to a Mac supported by the Tiger installer (I used my G4, if you don't have one, find a friend who does.)
4. Install Tiger onto the external drive.
5. Move the drive back to the laptop.
6. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the external drive onto the laptop internal drive

I now have a working copy of Tiger running on my Powerbook G3 Lombard. I've only had it working for a couple of hours, but I haven't found anything that doesn't work like it should.

Of course Sogudi works just fine with the new Safari.

10-May-2005

I've still encountered no problems. However, one anonymous person has reported the built-in SCSI port doesn't work. I've never used that port on this laptop (and frankly, I'm not sure I could find any working SCSI devices around the house), so I can't confirm.

Update: From the developer of XPostFacto : Apple dropped the driver from Tiger, but the Panther driver works if you copy it over -- it's AppleMesh.kext (in the /System/Library/Extensions folder). I'm working on an XPostFacto update for Tiger that will also take care of this, but you can just copy AppleMesh.kext if you want a quick workaround.

7-Jun-2005

Still going strong. It seems that XPostFacto is now available for Tiger, but I haven't tried it on my Lombard, yet. I think I will, if only to support that effort with some testing. At the very least, I'll watch the site carefully.