The president of my company leaves for Tortola (in the British Virgin Islands) for 5 months every year. In order to enable his continued participation in our meetings, I decided to put together an iChat Appliance (we’re all-mac in the office) for the conference room.

I began with a graphite Power Mac with a 533 MHz cpu, since we had 3 unused and laying around. I harvested more SDRAM (for a total of 1 GB) and an Airport card from other machines and added them to the 533 with the best graphics card (tied to the Motherboard). This machine now lives in the corner of the conference room on a shelf held up by old beige macs. A FireWire iSight is mounted above the office’s projection screen and is aimed at the conference room table. Under Panther, this worked perfectly, but I couldn’t share documents or take advantage of any of Leopard’s other new features. So I installed Leopard!

…which requires an 867 or higher cpu! Curses…

Happily, I found a post on MacRumors detailing how to modify the installation image, lowering the required MHz. Instead of burning it to a DVD-DL, I used Disk Utility to “restore” the sparseimage to a partition on a Firewire drive. I then booted the Graphite system from this drive, and installation went perfectly. I booted the system, fired up iChat AV and prepared to test the system. Instead of the usual Video preview in iChat AV’s setup, I saw a blank grey window stating:

“This computer does not support video conferencing.”

Nevermind the fact that while running 10.3 I could video conference perfectly. 10.5 and its new version of iChat didn’t believe I had the power. Apparently this happened to other people with real supported systems, so I found a thread and was lead to Apple’s official solution and poof, I can video conference again!

The downside is that now that it’s finished and working, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m a government official in V for Vendetta, being stared down on by the power-hungry Supreme Chancellor. A Supreme Chancellor in a floral print shirt.