Several years ago, I bought an XServe G5 because I wanted to teach myself more about servers. I gambled on buying a known-faulty machine in the belief that the purchase price plus the cost of fixing it would be less than the cost of a fully-functional one. This worked out: my total expenditure was about £300 while a known-good equivalent would have cost around £500 at the time.

repaired, then faulty again

The fault turned out to be a duff power-supply – XServalan would cut out in the middle of, or soon after, booting. After this surgery, she ran MacOS 10·5 happily – and this was very useful, especially when my MacBook Pro died and I needed to work in Adobe Creative Suite. Even though I now have Iggy, I still need a mac that can run MacOS 10·5 to run QuarkXpress 7·3 (needed for some freelance work). There are ways of flying MacOS 10·5 on an intel mac but they’re not so satisfactory, mainly due to the limited screen-size.

All was fine until last month, when the symptoms returned: XServalan wouldn’t even complete booting before shutting itself off. I’ve finally found time to replace the power supply with one from a box of XServe bits I obtained about a year ago. It’s quite a struggle to extract XServalan fully from its desk-side compartment

Let joy be unconfined: XServe has been resuscitated. His roar fills the hall.

edit

Here are screenshots of the different screen-sizes available:

• MacOS 10·5 running in VirtualBox virtual machine: limited to 1024 by 768 pixels
• MacOS 10·5 running on XServalan: limited to 1280 by 1024 pixels