Re: Mac mini

On Jan 11, 2005, at 11:39 PM, Roger Binns wrote:
> To be honest I detest MacOS and find it very user hostile.  I first 
> used
> it in 1985, and find that to be true even today.

  1985 bears no resemblance to today in terms of MacOS. However, I'm 
still open to the fact that you'll despise it after working with it 
when your new box arrives. :-)  I find Linux to be very user hostile, 
but geek friendly, so go figure.

> I have two reasons for doing some Mac stuff myself.

  I understand completely, Roger, and I hope you didn't think I was the 
least bit slighted by any of this. Even if I had a large chunk of time 
to put into the project, I would commend you for wanting to have 
first-class hands-on experience with how the Mac port is functioning.

> The real question is how many different versions of MacOS do I want to 
> deal with.  I am going to limit it to two, which will initially be 
> 10.3 and 10.4.  (Do you have any pointers on how to setup a machine so 
> I can make it multi-boot with completely independent partitions for 
> each version?)

  If I had my druthers, I wouldn't be building for Jaguar any longer. 
But, there is demand, so I do it. :-)  It's VERY unfortunate that Apple 
is going to really irritate you when they ask you to pay them $129 in a 
few months to buy a copy of Tiger. I almost ordered a Mac mini myself 
when I saw them, to use as a central backup server and media device, 
but then common sense got the better of me and I thought I would wait 
until it's shipping with Tiger. There will most likely (I almost can 
guarantee this) be ABSOLUTELY NO DISCOUNT on the purchase price of 
Tiger when it's released.

  Anyway, to the question at hand...  For my Jaguar stuff, I just put a 
drive into a cheap firewire enclosure and I boot from that to do Jaguar 
work, and I've left my internal drive strictly Panther. However, there 
is nothing that would prevent you from partitioning the drive and 
easily booting from either partition, it works very well... There is a 
preference panel in the system preferences to select which system you 
want to boot from, or you can simply hold down the OPTION key on the 
keyboard while booting the computer and it will present you with a 
graphical picker of partitions with installed versions of the OS to 
boot from.

  When you get it preloaded, you'll either have to boot from the 
included DVD and use the Disk Utility program to repartition it and 
then do a restore to the new smaller partition, or you'll have to 
purchase a utility program to do a live re-parition... There are no 
free tools to do this that I know of on the Mac.  If you have some 
Linux utility that can repartition HFS+ systems, I'd love to know about 
it. :-)

  There are two that I know of which are commercially available, both 
just under $50:

  iParition - http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iPartition.php

  VolumeWorks - 
http://www.subrosasoft.com/thestore/product_info.php?products_id=431

  Given that, I'd just re-install the system myself. :-)

> (*) I am busy watching the keynote.  Some good stuff there so who 
> knows ...

  I'm a musician as well, for me the upgrades to "GarageBand" are the 
biggest things coming out of the keynote... Coupled with the Mac mini, 
of course.

  Steve




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