I have around eight Beige G3's and really would like to upgrade them to Panther. So from a previous hint, I checked out XPostFacto. To get Panther to install and run on the Beige G3's, I had to buy a bunch of Radeon 7000 video cards, but Xpostfacto is awesome; I had to use version 3.0a15. Everything works like a charm! Firewire, USB, all iApps (except iDVD), Office, everything!
But there has always been one little annoyance. The OS X installers (including Panther) will only install on the first partition, which has to be 8GB or less on Beige G3s. There's a solution...
I have a bunch of 120GB drives, so I made two partitions with the OS 9 boot disk. First partition was ~119GB, second partition was 1024MB. Then I installed OS 9 onto the 1GB partition. Booted into OS 9 and installed all updates, drivers, and XPostFacto. Then I removed drive from the Beige G3 and put it into a newer Mac, and installed Panther onto the first partition including all updates.
Next, I moved the drive back to the beige G3, booted into OS 9, ran XPostFacto, set the NVram input to "keyboard," and output to the new video card. Finally clicked Restart to OS 10.3.3 and Yahooooo! It all came up just fine. StarWar's Pod Racing even works great under Classic. BTW, I packed these machines with 768mb of ram, 120GB drives, ATI radeon 7000 video cards, and overclocked from 300mhz to 350mhz or so.
Hope this helps those who want a little more life out of their Beige G3's.
[robg adds: I (obviously?) haven't tested this hint, but if it really does provide a workaround for the 8gb limit on Beige G3s, then I know a few folks who will be quite interested, so here it is. If someone does try this, please post if you are successful or not...]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040331130735963