After the breakdown of my old iMac, I got two replacements. The iMac is just perfect for some surfing and emailing and sits quite nicely in the corner of our living room. The first replacement I bought was exactly the same iMac as my original and I just replaced the hard disk to get the living room computer up and running again. But another iMac I had placed a bid on was available as well. These old iMac don't cost that much so I bought this one as well. The problem with the power supply might be occurring to these iMacs as well, so a spare one was not that bad.

The second one had a 500Mhz PowerPC CPU and should be a little bit faster than the replacement iMac. Another big advantage was the hard disk. It was much quieter than my old hard disk. So I really wanted to get this 500Mhz iMac in the living room. Only one problem exists. I installed my favorite Debian OS. I configured it to my wishes and put the computer in the living room. Then I discovered that the CRT screen was configured in such a way that it was really dark...

Using MacOS 9 there is a utility to configure the CRT, but this is not available under Linux. So I probably have to install MacOS 9 to adjust my CRT. But I really do not want to reconfigure the partitions on the hard disk to just adjust my CRT.

Another possibility is to use Mac-On-Linux to install MacOS in a disk-image on my computer. But this has two other problems. First the CDROM drive is broken on the iMac I need to adjust, so installing from CD is a problem. Second problem is that trying to start Mac-On-Linux on the other iMac I use for testing stuff resulted in a system hangup.

I'll probably try to go to debian/testing on my other iMac to see if a upgrade is stable on the moment and to see if Mac-on-Linux is functioning on this machine. I could try to install MacOS 9 in a drive-image I can later use on the living room iMac so I can finally adjust the CRT.

It almost seems the old iMac is about just as bad as the new iBrick (iPhone) regarding to other uses than the one path Apple sees fit for its hardware.