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.

Reformatting an NTFS drive in OS X

I was loaned a PC hard drive formatted to NTFS (which is notoriously difficult to remove) a little while ago. The owner had given it to a friend and both said there was nothing on the drive and there was nothing they could do with it. It so happened I was running out of room on the Mac so I went out and picked up an external box which has both Firewire and USB 2.0 on it. As soon as I plugged it in I found the three NTFS partitions. It complained I didn't have permission to do anything with it. Since there was indeed nothing useful on it I figured it would be smarter to reformat it in HFS+ (the standard Mac format).

Hunting for the instructions wasn't all that easy. I had to refer to a web page. There I found the command to perform all sorts of functions related to the hard drives was the "diskutil" command. To properly access it the user/administrator needs to go into the terminal and type the command. From there the program gives instructions on what works and how to do it. Fortunately for me it catches improperly phrased commands otherwise I would have lost the internal drive. To format an external drive use the following command as a guide...

diskutil filesystem_type new_name /dev/disk*

Within a couple of seconds, things are working like a charm.