I spent a few hours this weekend setting up a new mac-Mini in the bedroom. In general, the whole experience was pretty smooth, and I have considerably more faith that this computer will not become a maintainence nightmare, like the house's last remaining Windows box. The mini scores a few points on linux, for plugging in camera's and setting up sound etc. (but I expect it looses sorely in ability to compile stuff, given the literny of problems I've seen on mailing lists over the last year.)
One thing that did not impress me was Quicktime, while it cutely played movie trailers, It had quite a few problems with avi files.
a) came up with a message about unreadable format, and redirected me to a page listing 3rd party add-ons (without specifying which one I might need)
b) refused to go fullscreen..
Given the overal quality of the rest of OSX, these where rather disappointing. A quick SMS to a friend indicated that VLC was a better bet for AVI's... - he did suggest MS's media player, but keeping anything from MS, as far away as possible from this box, is the general plan..
A few other things installed very easily
- NeoOffice/J (Open office for osx)
- Firefox - Safari is cute, but not quite as polished as firefox.
The other bit that confused me totally was that it had no root account by default, you have to go through various steps to enable it.. - so now we have apt-get working, although what looks like a rather limited choice of applications..
Now to get ssh working so I can do compile tests with some of the php libraries..
Comments
OS X
Hi Alan,
You might want to take a look at replacing the hard disk (manually..). Those disks in there are 4200RPM 2.5in drives as I remember. The RAM's 333Mhz, so nothing you can do about that (except replace the stick).
SSH can be enabled by going to Preferences -> Sharing.
For root I use sudo su -, that's probably the best way.
Anyway, I installed Fink + X11 + DeveloperTools + VLC, just to make life bearable on my PowerBook. :-) Oh, I also dragged the Terminal.app program icon to the bar at the bottom, so I get my terminal quickly.
VLC...
I second VLC for video playing. Anytime it's an .avi it goes straight to VLC. Anything else I generally try with Quicktime first.
sudo / Quicktime Player
Use "sudo -s" instead of "sudo su -". It's lesser to type. BTW: root may be enabled by just setting a root password (passwd) in a root shell (sudo -s).
Full screen in Quicktime Player works in the US$30 Pro version only. Use the free application QTAmateur instead.
DivX/XVid/3ivX
Get the plugin from www.3ivx.com in order to get Quicktime playing divx/xvid/etc content without complaint. You can also use a plugin from www.divx.com, but it doesn't cover anything other than divx I believe.
Quicktime can read the avi container format fine, but just doesn't ship with divx/xvid/etc codecs.
I actually prefer the Quicktime player to VLC simply because of the better interface. But yes, it doesn't do fullscreen without being upgraded to Pro, so VLC is very useful to have on hand.
As to root account, as someone else said, you should use sudo for any root-requiring tasks.
