[ale] OT New thread -new iMacs- Joe's question

[aaron]

On Wednesday 01 March 2006 01:31, Mark Wright wrote:
> Sounds like you have a good plan there.
[snip]
> It is hard to beat the price of a Mac Mini when you consider the  
> features.

Indeed!
-- My life partner's Mac Mini (OSeX 10.4) arrived about 2 weeks ago and she 
has been transformed into a very happy geek.

I've been using, maintaining and exploring OSeX systems for a couple years 
now, so I was able to offer a lot help with the transition.  Not to go long 
on OT, but I thought it worth sharing a couple of the pluses and problems of 
getting a windoze victim moved over to Mac OSeX. The activity on this thread 
indicates an increasing number of Mac adopters in this group who are finding 
OSeX a nice hybrid of OSS / BSD and "family friendly" commercial tools, as 
well a system that plays very nicely with Linux:

First thing to know is that Apple still hides their brightest light under a 
bushel, so the X11 environment still doesn't come pre-installed.  You have to 
boot to the system install DVD and select X11 on the CUSTOM Update menu, a 
process that isn't all that "intuitive". I haven't yet installed the 
available apt-get tools of  Fink & Fink Commander on her system, but it 
hasn't been needed since a lot of the GUI OSS packages that use X11 have 
standard launch icons and can be run and installed on the system like any 
native application: drag & drop // double click.

We put her windblows machine on a KVM switch with the Mac; access to running 
the old system proved helpful when salvaging some of her data from viral M$ 
formats. It was just a few clicks in Mac preferences to turn on File Sharing 
and Samba, providing seamless connections to all the systems on our Network, 
which includes Windoze, Linux and MacX. She has now migrated most all of her 
documents, photos, emails, addresses and other data, and figures she will be 
able to take her old M$ virus farm totally off line in the near future.
(: read "oh boy, a new box to play Linux on"! :)

A quirk to note here is that the Mac didn't map the compact USB PC keyboard as 
well as we would have liked or expected; handy CD eject and volume controls 
were not mapped to function keys and NUM LOCK for the keypad was not an 
option, probably since keypad navigation mode isn't available on Mac 
keyboards. In the end she ordered a compact keyboard made by Kensington that 
is designed for Mac (including the 'apple key' labels) and includes keymap 
driver software. Of course, _that_ keyboard doesn't like the USB>PS2>USB 
connections needed with our KVM switch. Argh.

The biggest data transfer hassles have been trying to salvage email archives 
and address books from viral M$ Outlook format into Mac Mail.  There were no 
direct import options in Mac Mail, so we decided to try Thunderbird as an 
intermediary.  With considerable frustrations and tinkering we have succeeded 
in transferring and re-indexing all her email file folders and addresses with 
Thunderbird on the Mac.  Unfortunately, getting from Thunderbird to Mac Mail 
is still being a stubborn step. She is insisting on using Mac Mail because it 
is nicely integrated with the Mac address book and iCal utilities, so for 
now, when she needs to access her archives she cuts and pastes from 
Thunderbird. We're keeping an eye out for a better solution.

She is trying NeoOffice/J as a replacement for M$ Orifice and, so far, has 
been fairly happy with it, finding most word processing, formatting and 
printing functions familiar. The NeoOffice port of Open Office (1.2) is a 
little more "natively" integrated than the Xwindows version in terms of file 
and printer option requesters. An important plus was that OOo did a good job 
of recognizing all the formatting, footnotes and indexing of the 500+ page 
book files that she just sent off to the publisher.

She is trying to wrap her head around GIMP.app (2.2.10), but the couple of 
Photo Shop classes she was exposed to seem to be making this difficult. ;-P  
She may geek it out, but it's a tougher sell than OOo. A small OSex 10.4 
quirk was needing to install the very latest GIMP.app package to enable 
direct printing.

We have a Brother All-In-One PSF (USB / Network) printer that was not 
immediately recognized using the software drivers from its CD -- however, 
once we downloaded and installed a driver software update from Brother the 
printer was recognized and easily added by the 10.4 printing system and 
printer utility software. The Mac "add printer" utility also made the CUPS 
connection to our old Apple Network Laser Writer a matter of a few point and 
click menu choices.

The last but clearly most important transition step was finding playable 
replacements for her handful of favorite games. :-) Given both the OSeX and 
X11 OSS environments, it was an easy evening cruise on the web to download 
and install free versions of all her favorites, and a few of the new games 
even offered some feature improvements over their legacy counterparts.

Overall, as I said at the start, she is a very happy Mac geek now and is truly 
thrilled to free of the mind numbing frustrations of Micro$haft.  It's also 
nice to have her using a system that I will actually help her learn and 
explore. I made her suffer though her many years of M$ trials and 
tribulations mostly by herself since, for the sake of my sanity, I hold 
rather strictly to the computer maintenance mantra "I don't do windoze."
Linux and MacOSeX are making that mantra easier to say every day!

peace
aaron