In 2003, I got my first laptop computer. It happened to be an iBook 800MHz. That computer was my primary computer for doing pretty much anything until 2006, when I upgraded to an 20" iMac.

After the upgrade, glossolalia — my old iBook — got shoved into a closet and forgotten. In 2008, we moved, and glossolalia got demoted from a closet to the garage, where it sat until late in 2008 when I got the crazy idea to install Ubuntu Hardy PPC on it. It sucked; nothing really worked right out of the box, and frankly, it performed like a heron trying to fly after being doused in molasses. Not that the iBook was ever a speed demon. But the lack of decent video drivers added insult to injury.

Fast forward to today. At my old job, I had a totally awesome fully-loaded Macbook Pro, so it was my work and, often, what I used at home (after all, it’s hard to move the iMac from the home office to the easy chair in front of the TV). Being that rPath wasn’t going to part with the MBP on my way out, I decided to reacquaint myself with my old laptop.

First thing I did was reinstall Mac OS X. I have the disks for Panther and Tiger, but I thought that Tiger would probably suck on this old box, so I opted for the hasn’t-been-updated-since-2005 Panther. After about 45 minutes, it was fully installed with all the latest updates (10.3.9).

Next step was to download the essentials:

• iTerm (because Terminal sucks)
• Colloquy (the latest requires 10.4 or later, so I’m stuck at 2.1)
• -Dropbox- (fail: not supported on 10.3.9)
• Camino (lighter weight than Firefox 3, and looks better on OS X, anyways)
• Opera (also lightweight, and it does everything except make me a sammich)
• NeoOffice (why not?)
• X Resource Graph (so I can see the slowness)
• Quicksilver (limited to B36, but I can’t really live without it)
• Growl (for application notification; limited to version 0.7.6, though)
• BitTorrent (Transmission stopped supporting 10.3.9 around 0.6.×.)
• Adobe Flash (Version 9 is the last version to support 10.3.9. And, since Adobe loves you, they let you download old versions of Flash, as long as you don’t mind DOWNLOADING EVERY MINOR RELEASE FOR EVERY PLATFORM. Thus, I had to download an 140 MB ZIP file to get the one DMG I needed to install Flash 9. Joy.)
• Mercurial (for source control)
• Python (for a little fun)

So, after about two hours, I have a usable secondary machine which happens to be portable, and I didn’t have to spend a dime. Sure, it’ll never win a speed contest, but it’s fine for webbrowsing and mail. Plus, it can go to the coffee shop or in the den. Also: the thing won’t end up a landfill. Everyone wins!