The Caffeinated Penguin

Posted By matt on April 3, 2005

I need some coffee….

Anyway, this is the first in some info about the Mac Mini. How I'm using it, how it stacks up, etc.

First, I want to bitch slap everyone who said it was slow. It's about as fast as a comparably clocked Pentium M. No, it's not a dual G5 tower, but then again, it's not supposed to be. However, it's plenty fast for us normal people.

Okay, moving along. The first thing I did was set it up to dual boot Ubuntu and OSX, so that I could try Mac On Linux. This is REALLY impressive. Call it something like 95% of native speed (aka – not noticeably slow). Quite good. However, there were some drawbacks:

• Hardware seems to only be detected when OSX is started; anything hotplug (USB) and newly mounted (CD's) doesn't show up, which is kind of limiting.
• ALSA support for the sound in the Mini is kind of iffy right now. It works with a patch.. sortof.

So, considering that a dual Athlon box is just a KVM hotkey combination away, it wasn't really worth running Linux on the Mini. So, ultimately, I wiped it and put just OSX back on it, which is what I'm twiddling with now.

I also joined the community, but my initial “Hello, just joined, new Mac owner, longtime Linux guy” post was basically met with a “Well, Linux isn't ready for the desktop, so it's good that Apple has given us real Unix machines.”

EX-cuse me?

So, I twigged out a bit, called the guy a git, started a flamewar, and left the community.

I guess I just expected more from an OSX community. It's funny to think of Linux people as more balanced than Mac people, but that's the way it seems.

Anyway, when next I get a chance – overview of all the apps that I installed to make OSX even beefier. I don't know when that will be: the rain was supposed to allow me to do nothing this weekend but drink coffee and poke the Mini, but today I figured I'd be good and pull a Gig-E cable over to Liz's G5 tower (whose Primary HDD is making click of doom noises, so she needs to back it up) as well as wire up her study for surround sound, DVD player, etc. So, I figured that if I finished that up tomorrow with a trip to Radio Shack (she lost the A/C adapter) and Home Depot (I need a saw so that I can build her a wee shelf for the bits, as well as a package of JB Weld and a Tap and Die set to plug and re-tap a stripped hole in one of my paintguns), I might be able to get a pass to just dick around on the machine. But, it doesn't look like that will fly, because Pier 1 has some new stuff in, and while we're in the area, we should hit JC Penny and Macys and all that… So, there goes my Sunday. Plus, I get to drive around in Warwick with all the short bus RI drivers.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Night kiddies…

Category: LJ Import
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