Category: Mac Mini

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.

I’ve been watching Macs for about 3 years now with a bit of envy. Apple, a few weeks ago, released the Mac Mini – “The most affordable Mac ever”. Within the first two weeks, Apple dropped the price of the memory, bluetooth, and wireless options. This made the Mac Mini even more enticing.

I began looking into picking one up as a toy. I’ve never used a Mac in my life. I’ve absolved myself of Windows about 3 years ago 100%, even at work. The only Windows applications I use are Quicken 2004 and the occasional Visio diagram that I get emailed to me.

Well, last Saturday, I went out and bought a Mac Mini. I bought the standard $499 model as a little box to just get started on. I had heard that the Minis were a bit under powered but I figured, it won’t be my primary machine, just a play-thing for my “Digital Lifestyle”, i.e. digital pictures, digital music, and digital video.

Well, the $499 Mini comes with 1 Firewire, 2 USB, 1 DVI ( with VGA adapter ), 56K modem, audio output, 10/100 ethernet, 40GB HD, 256MB RAM, DVD-ROM/CDRW, and a security slot so no one walks away with this sleek little Mac. the Mini also doesn’t come with a mouse or keyboard. This was perfectly ok with me as I prefer to use my ergonomic keyboard and mouse rather than the Mac Keyboard and Mouse. I opted not to get the 80GB HD, Bluetooth, or the DVD Rewriteable as I already have one on my Fedora Core 3 PC.

I spent the first three or four days configuring and just getting comfortable with the Mac. Being a Linux user, the first place I concentrated was getting familiar with all the keyboard shortcuts. I also had to install Firefox. Safari isn’t bad but I found it to be a little slow in rendering pages as compared to FireFox (I’m not too crazy about the fact that I can’t synchronize my Firefox bookmarks to the .Mac service with isync).

I also needed to install OpenOffice. To do this, I had to first download and install the Mac OS X 11 Kit ( ). After installing the X11 kit, running OpenOffice was a no brainer.

I then went about installing Fink. The goial of Fink is to modify existing Unix software to work on Darwin/OS X. Another no brainer. Once Fink was installed, I had to manually run the configuration script. Upon completion, I ran apt-get to get the MySQL and Postgres client applications installed. I had to be able to SQL to my Linux from my Mini. No problems at all!

More to come …