Adventures upgrading to OS X 10.6

I discovered some interesting things about the Mac last month. My PC was down for a while until I replaced a hard drive and so I was motivated to do some needed upgrades to the operating system.

The first thing I found was some of the applications I was using ceased to function under Tiger (10.4). They needed Leopard (10.5) or Snow Leopard (10.6).

When I went out to get 10.6 for the machine I found Apple was selling two versions. There was a $200 version and a $30 version. Two friends and the folks at the newly opened Apple Store said I would have to upgrade using the $200 version because I was skipping from 10.4 to 10.6. I asked around to see what the difference in the two versions was. There was something vague about iLife (which I didn't use anyway since I think it's pretty useless). I asked Bill M. from Call-A.P.P.L.E. about this and he said just to use the $30 version. Anything missing would be handled through the update procedure. It turns out he was correct.

After installing 10.6 I found a feature which had been available in Linux for years. This is the use of multiple desktops. They call it "Open Spaces". This feature is immensely useful on newer machines. It helps organise what is happening on the computer. Apparently this has been available since 10.5 but since I skipped that version...

One of the third party programs I was using broke under 10.6. GIMP (a Photoshop alternative) stopped running. After tracking down the problem I came to the conclusion Apple took out the X-tools from 10.6. Guess what GIMP needs to run...

In the process of looking for useful software for the Mac I found a couple of sites which let the user compile *NIX programs from source. I don't have the links handy, only the names. The one I used is Mac Ports. The other is FINK. There is a third but again, I don't have the name handy. I decided to try and install the GIMP from Mac Ports and it failed. However I did manage to compile a news reader called PAN. The thing is it took a long time to satisfy dependencies before it was finished.

Understandably the Mac now has substantially less space on the hard drive.

Mint Linux

I've been trying out Mint Linux (http://linuxmint.com/) for the last few months. It is a multimedia distro based on Ubuntu. My motivation is I would like to find a usable distro for the "average user". I tried version 7 and was impressed. Version 8 is less impressive but still functional. When the 64 bit version came out I gave it a try and was not impressed at all by the way it handled KDE. Granted both Mint and Ubuntu prefer the Gnome interface, I prefer KDE. Gnome works fine for those looking to give it a try.

As with most modern Linux distros Mint comes on a live disk (CD/DVD). This is to say it will run off the disk and not touch the hard drive on a computer unless the user chooses to do so. The option to install the operating system is available as an icon on the desktop. It's sort of a "try before you buy" situation. The thing the user needs to bear in mind is because it is running off of the disk it will be SLOW. Once installed on the hard drive it is much faster.

This particular disro has a fairly high "wow" factor. Particularly if the user has an interest in multimedia.