My New Mac!
So hey! This is my first post from my new Power Mac! The eBay guy took a month to get it to me (despite me paying $55 for shipping) and it *reeks* of cigarette smoke and didn't have a power cable, but it does indeed work and I'm up and running on my very own Mac!
I'm not sure what to think just yet. First, I need to upgrade to Panther as it's still on 10.2, and I need to plug some more RAM into this sucker as running a few apps is *very* noticeable right now. But I just did a software update, grabbed the basic apps I need and am functioning quite well so far.
First, I'm amazed at how little I know about a Mac. I had some trouble installing Thunderbird because it came on a .dmg "disk image" and I couldn't figure out why it didnt' just run until i noticed the icon looked like a drive and copied it out. First thought: I've been using Linux so much lately that I *didn't trust the icon* LOL. Silly me. Secondly, I need to pick up an OSX book because I don't know anything about the OS really. The nice thing is that OSX at the core is Unix, so when the Mail app was not closing for me, I just opened at terminal and "killall Mail.app" did the job. Perfect.
My first surprise: The Mail App really sucks. I linked up to my IMAP account and it grabbed all these hidden folders, etc. from my home directory instead of my Mail dir. Urgh. And it was slow and very unusable. I was happy to see that the latest and greatest Thunderbird is available for the Mac and after the above mentioned mental adjustment I am up and running. I'll probably use Safari over FireFox, but we'll see. I like the idea of sharing my bookmarks between my Windows, Linux and Mac desktops...
I couldn't believe how heavy the G4 is. I mean it's solid. I like the little fold-down door. but man, it's like it has bricks in it. And it's *loud* as well. I'm used to my laptops which only turn on the fan when it's really hot, and then it's relatively quiet. I may have to buy some extension cords for this thing and put it in my closet. ;-) The little hockey-puck mouse that came with the box is pretty cute. And useless. The first thing I did is change it out for a laser wheel mouse with a normal amount of buttons. It's *really* too bad that Apple doesn't make one of those, no?
I bought a 19" Samsung monitor to go with the Mac and have a resolution of 1600x1200 and that's very nice as well. I'm getting used to having lots of screen real estate at work, and it's fun to have it at home too. Though I have to say that I'm going ot have to play with the font sizes as everything is just a teensy bit too small at the moment. Between that and the reek of stale cigarettes from this keyboard, I'm getting a headache.
So between the Mac, the Monitor and the shipping, I've spent $600 on this computer so far. Oof. I don't want to even think about the honkin' Debian box I could've gotten for that amont of money. ;-) If you add the $125 I'm thinking about dropping to upgrade to panther, this "move to mac" is starting to become real money. I may hold off on upgrading for a while just for that reason. I'm sorry, even going to the cheap route which I'm doing, Macs are *still* expensive.
I'm amazed at how "virtual" I'm becoming. It's nice to have my own dedicated server out there (which runs this site), as it's becoming a "share point' for my different OSes. Though I dont' think I'll be programming on this box any time soon. Unless more ram improves the performance substantially. I do like the idea that more and more GOOD software is out there and cross platform. or if not, there's at least equivalents like Snak for IRC chating, and iCal for calendaring, etc. I'm sure I'll disover more.
Now, I use a Linux box at work, I've got a Mac I'm setting up at home and two Windows Laptops (my old Win2K Dell Latitude which Ana uses and my Toshiba WinXP that I used daily until just recently). That could drive me insane very quickly. I *really* like the Debian system I've got running at work. It's damn close to being really user-friendly. It's not Mac user friendly, or even Windows user friendly yet, but it's really getting there. I'd say a few more revs of Gnome will hit the sweet spot of "good enough' to start really making it a viable alternative. But I'm a geek, so as soon as I get the time and nerve, I'm going to back up my laptop and install Debian as a dual-boot so I can cut down the number of OSes I use substantially. ;-)
Okay, I've been screwing with this box all morning. Time to start my day.
-Russ