OSX Tiger and FrameMaker

[Graeme Forbes]

There seems to be a bit of confusion in answering Ann's question 
about FM and Tiger. Bottom line: if it's a G5 Mac you've got (or G4, 
G3...) FrameMaker will run fine under OS X 10.2, 10.3 (Panther) or 
10.4 (Tiger). Dunno about 10.0 or 10.1

This is because the G5 supports Apple's Classic environment, which 
allows OS9 to run inside any recent version of OSX that can be 
installed on a G5 computer.

If you buy a newer Mac with an Intel chip, you're out of luck (a 
qualification -- there are certain programs which emulate OS7 or OS8 
inside OSX on an Intel Mac, so you can run -- sort of -- FM5 or FM6; 
or you can emulate, or even boot into, Windows -- yeah, right -- and 
run Windows FM).

An entirely different question is whether your machine can *boot 
into* OS9 (OS9 controls the computer, not OSX with Classic running 
inside it). I had a G4 desktop which could boot OS9, and OS9 apps 
like FM7 fairly flew. But of course I couldn't run OSX apps without 
rebooting. I think my particular model may have been the last or 
second last Mac capable of booting OS9. G5 Macs can't. But for 
FrameMaker, running in Classic is not merely perfectly acceptable, 
it's actually better than running on any machine controlled by OS9. 
OSX is vastly more stable, and if Classic chokes, it's only a Classic 
relaunch to get things going again, not a hardware reboot.

As part of Apple's plot to abandon its customers still using non-OSX 
software, they stopped shipping G4/G5 Macs with Classic installed 
some time ago. Once your new OS 10.x is going on your machine, you 
may have to go to the Help menu and search for "Classic" to find out 
where on your installation disks they've hidden the Classic 
installler. But it'll be there somewhere.

Hope that helps,
Graeme Forbes