Cogs can think.

After the problems of a few days ago, I decided to simply reinstall my Cube altogether - the only way ‘the world’s most advanced operatng system’ can make way for a 2nd operating system on its hard drive.

After backing all important stuff up to my Server 2003 server, I booted from my Tiger DVD, used Disk Utility to create two partitions, and then installed OS X, followed by Mac OS 9 (which you need to update in order to 9.2.2). All went mighty fine, and a few hours later I had two fully working installations of the Mac OS on my beloved Cube. Anyway, if you are pondering (re)entering the wonderful world of OS 9 too, here are a few things you should know.

First of all, the browser situation on OS 9 is rather daft. There is no Firefox for OS 9, and the latest Mozilla build is 1.3.1 - old. Your best bet is to use iCab 3, an up-to-date browser for both OS 9 and OS X. It supports all fancy schmancy stuff, including Flash (Flash 7 is available for OS 9 from Adobe’s website, and runs YouTube just fine).

For emailing, look no further than the best email client ever: Outlook Express:Mac, 5.02 (bundled and default). This is a very elegant and extremely resource-friendly (7.1MB of RAM!) email client, with some really, really clever stuff built into it. Especally if you have a lot of mailing lists to manage, Outlook:Mac 5.02 is a dream come true. One of the best things to come out of Redmond.

There are a lot of different instant messaging clients available for OS 9, so just pick whatever protocol’s official client you use. Sadly, I have been unable to find a decent multi-protocol IM client. For IRC, ircle is a good client, even though it’s shareware.

Another must-have for OS 9 is SmoothType, a preference panel which greatly enhances OS 9’s font antialiasing capabilities (quite similar to that of Mac OS X). It’s only $10. You’ll also need something like USB Overdrive or Kensington’s MouseWorks to enable multi-button mouse and scrollwheel support (both do not seem to work with Apple’s Mighty Mouse, though).

For all other stuff, there’s still a boatload of OS 9 applications available on the net.