iBook Drive Upgrade
I went and did the famous iBook disk upgrade that's at these two websites. It went pretty much as advertised, and these notes are just an addendum to the good instructions already out there.
iBook Hard Drive Upgrade - http://caslis.com/mac/ibook/ibdrive.html
The tools I used were: a 5mm nut driver, a T9 torx wrench (Sears model 45732), a small philips screwdriver (Sears model 45726), a regular philips screwdriver, and a flat blade screwdriver.
To keep the screws straight, I used a piece of packing tape with sticky side up. That, or an ice cube tray are the way to go. I recommend labeling each screw, or at least sets of screws. Don't mix them, becase are few are longer than the rest.
When you pull the top panel off, you start at the back. You can pry a little with a screwdriver, but be careful or you'll scratch something. You can work the cover off counterclockwise, "peeling" it off like you'd peel the plastic lid off tupperware. When you put the top panel back on, start at the back, and then the front.
When you're removing the modem port, don't force it. It's all about the angle you're pulling at: just put a screw or pen in there and push straight upward (gently).
When reassembing, keep track of which screws go in when, because several holes need to remain empty until the end. I didn't do this, and had to undo a few screws.
Don't overtighten! If you have a wide handle on the nut driver, be extra gentle.
I did mess up one thing. The trackpad connector uses a plastic wedge to hold the edge connector in, and I broke the wedge when I tried to pry it out. It went back together enough to work, though.
Overall time for me was 2 hours to get the thing open and together again. Yes, it's 36 screws, but that's not much more than the typical PC. (They have around 20 to 30.) The top cover and screen are a pain, though.
OSX Installation
I had to partition the drive into two areas. (BTW, the drive was a 12G IBM Travelstar, $85. Yeah, kind of expensive.) In order to make it work, I had to partition and format both as HFS. Later, when I installed OSX, I reformatted the OSX partition as UFS.
Then, for some reason, the install took a long time, like over 1/2 an hour.
I just found http://www.osxgnu.org where they have many OS X packages for important applications. There, I got the latest packages for OpenSSL and OpenSSH.
Open Firmware
The other important thing to do is get the latest OpenFirmware? upgrade from http://www.info.apple.com/downloads/ (the trailing / matters). It went okay, once I figured out that you press Command-Power and HOLD IT DOWN until you hear a long beeeeeeeep. Then you let it up, and the firmware updates.
Two more OS installs!
I was not happy with the disk performance. In OS 9, it was okay (not great), but in OS X, the drive thrashed around, and everything took two or three times as long as I expected. Something was wrong.
My first guess was my disk partitioning. I figured that doing it in OS 9 was wrong. So I followed the booklet's directions and partitioned from the OS X install CD. This time, I made the UFS partition first, and the HFS one second. Upshot: no difference. Disk thrashed a lot.
My second guess was the drive. I thought it might be slow. But, the drive was sitting unused over a month and I could not return it. Groan... So, I guesstimated that, at worst, I'm looking at a 30% slowdown. That seemed not to be the culprit. So I thought some more, and guessed it was UFS, and perhaps the thrashing was the OS being inefficient.
They call it Fast File System, but that doesn't mean a specific implementation will be fast. (Besides, I'm used to ext2fs, which is pretty fast.)
So, I did another install, with all the disk formatted as HFS. That did the trick! I still think the disk is a little slow, but the overall performance feels like my prior installation.
So, until Apple implements a better UFS driver, don't use UFS for OS X unless you need the security.
With every upgrade, I feel just a little more compelled to turn this iBook into a Linux laptop.