Well, I’ve been playing with the Mini for just over a week now. Everything’s been pretty smooth other than needing lots of memory and being close to filling up the hard drive.
Now, the fun part has been ssh’ing to my Linux box and trying to run Novell Evolution. So far, I’ve had no luck at being able to run X window apps across the network.
- On the Mini I ran xhost +
- On the Linux PC, I ran “setenv DISPLAY mini:0.0;evolution”
The application just sits there, no core file gets created, no response, nothing. Not sure why. More to look into….
I found Aqua to be a nice little interface but I found the menu bars at the top of the desktop to be rather weird. It takes some getting used to but it’s not horrible.
Eventhough Apple ships its mice with one button, I found that Aqua actually supports two button mice well and it even supports the mouse wheel without problem. This was nice as I can’t imagine using one mouse button for everything.
Overall, after eight days of using a Mac Mini, the only thing I’m disappointed with is the performance with 256MB of RAM. One of these days, I’ll have to take the machine into an Apple store and get it upgraded to at least 512 MB, most likely 1GB.
I don’t think I’ll be giving up my Thinkpad T40 running Fedora Core 3, but I do think that instead of setting up a Linux based machine for my mother, the Mac Mini might be a great alternative in the kitchen but definitely not a replacement for my Fedora Core 3 desktop, just yet. Much more horsepower than the Mini would be needed … however, it is possible … some day.