Newbie with dumb questions...

[Tony Smith]

Hi Everyone.

I was recently given a dead Powerbook G3 Pizmo, all I got was the PB
itself......

First hurdle was overcome by making a 24 volt power supply for it, which
led me to some hours on the Apple technical boards and the purchase of a
new PRAM battery.

This got the book going and I was able to ascertain that it had 64meg of
memory and had OS-9 installed.

Hardware wise I´ve upgraded to 256meg of RAM and a USB wheel-mouse (I
have an absolute loathing of touch-pad type interface).

Software wise I didn´t understand OS-9 having had nothing to do with
Apple equipment before and a quick search on the Internet resulted in me
downloading YDL 3.01 and 4.0.....

Hurrah! An OS I sort of understand (a little past ¨newbie¨ stage in
Linux.

Installed 4.0 and ran into trouble with sound and a few other things,
not wanting to fight too many battles on too many fronts I reverted to
3.01 on the grounds (apparently justified if my experience is anything
to go on) that it might not be the latest, but it would be stable.

I´ve got Internet access via my home Lan, email works as does
newsgroups, and I´ve even got my networked Lexmark and HP lasers
printing from Open Office.

With a bit of effort I have got sharing with my Win2K boxen working and
downloaded/installed an updated Xmmms that doesn´t crash the way the
¨off the CD¨ version did.

But, there are a couple of things that are evading me.

I can seem to get any response from the PCMCIA port, I want to run a
Orinoco radio card, I will eventually buy an Airport card, but they are
absurdly priced in Australia, I can buy about 6 ¨standard¨ WiFi cards
for what is being asked for 1 Airport, which is a bit stiff for 802.11b
gear.

Anyway, any clues on how to get the cardbus slot enabled will be
gratefully received, I *think* I can manage to install drivers and set
up configuration, I stymied at getting the machine to admit that the
card is inserted at present.

The second major bugbear I have is that I spend a lot of time listening
to Radio National (http://www.abc.net.au/rn) and prefer the net version
to live as FM reception is marginal where I live. The RN stream is a
choice of either Windows Media format or Realplayer format.

I kind of know that Windows Media isn´t *ever* going to work on any
Linux machine, but I can find a PPC implementation of a Realplayer. Does
such a thing exist and where do I get it?


I´ll probably have more questions, but at the moment solutions to these
two would lower the frustration levels somewhat