Installing Leopard on an iLamp

Remember that iMac G4? The one with the screen that could swivel 360°? The one lying in your basement, deprecated because you could not install the newest Mac OS? Well, as it turns out, today I installed leopard on one with a 700 MHZ processor. Processors less than 867 MHZ are not supported under leopard. However, it turns out that the processor was not the problem.

To install, I put the leopard CD into a 1 GHZ PowerBook G4 and rebooted both machines, putting the iMac into FireWire target mode first. The install went off without a hitch; Leopard detected the iLamp disk in target mode, and about an hour and a half later we had leopard installed. It booted up just fine, ran everything fine, and even ran Front Row. However, sometimes when it would fall asleep the iMac would wake up with a rainbow of vertical lines on the screen. I have not found a fix for this yet, but think that it is due to the iMac having a poor integrated video card. It's still not a speed demon, but if you set it to never sleep, but enable a screensaver you should have fewer problems.

UPDATE: The network and computer icon is actually a hi-res iLamp icon; this shows that Apple was perhaps originally going to have supported machines under 867 MHZ, but did not want to support terribly old hardware.