Caltrops - Tansin A. Darcos's Alter Ego





	[quote name="Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS)"]I am using a new (to me) computer that just arrived yesterday, a Macintosh OS X 10.4 PowerPC. I am posting this message from that Mac. Now, some might say it's obsolete because Apple stopped supporting it back in 2009. But, as I see it, for not a lot of money I get the opportunity to get my feet wet doing some things on a Mac and discover if I should go further. The machine cost $100 plus another $30 to ship and once I got it, I saw why. The damn thing is twice the size of either my Optiplex or Acer, both of which are also 64-bit desktop/tower machines (running Windows). OS X 10.4 ("Tiger") is old ("old" meaning "originated in 2005"), and Apple would be happy to sell me an upgrade to OS X 10.8 ("Mountain Lion") for $20. I might go with that at some point in the future, right now I'm just having some fun playing around with it. But it's interesting that since Apple went to using Intel processors most of the software being released in open source is only supporting Mac on Intel and is no longer supporting IBM's PowerPC processor. This machine is spare and huge. The box has two handles, one on the front and one on the back, is silver-gray anodized aluminum, has a slot for an optical disc (which I originally thought was not installed), and the front looks like a speaker grille. There is a control panel on the front which is on the left center, is about 1/2" wide and 3 inches long, consisting of a power light, on-off button, USB 2.0 port, and Firewire port. That's all. I thought the optical disc was not present because it was a flat plate, but issuing the eject disc command from iTunes caused the plate to drop (inside) and the tray to pop out. From what I read I suspect it's a DVD writer. The back has a video card with output for DVI and ADC, a couple of antenna ports for AirPort and Bluetooth, two USB 2.0 ports, 3 audio ports, 2 more firewire ports, an Ethernet port, a modem port and a power socket. This machine weighs a whopping 55 pounds. No wonder I had to slide it across the floor to move it. I bought it off Amazon for technical reasons - I was approved for one of their store credit cards and thus I'm not using my regular credit - and the one mistake I made was I bought a DVI to VGA adapter cable (which actually arrived before the computer did) because I figured I could use my existing KVM to run it. But the cord is the wrong type, either I would need an adapter to hook up to the VGA, or I should have purchased a DVI cable, because I discovered that my monitor supports both VGA and DVI input. So I can't use the KVM and for some reason hooking the Apple to the monitor directly via the DVI to VGA cable doesn't work. I didn't want to wait, so I went on-line and discovered that Radio Shack sells DVI monitor cables, they cost $27. While RatShack is often higher price, I've found their stuff works well out of the box, so I take the bus over there, buy the cable for $30 with tax, and come home. I have a spare USB keyboard; a Mac can use the same USB keyboard as a PC as long as you realize the ALT key is COMMAND and the Windows key is OPTION. I borrow my 2-button with scroll-wheel USB mouse (the Mac stopped using a one-button mouse years ago), and plug both into the mac. plug in a power cord - it's the same one as a Wintel - reset my monitor to DVI, and BOOM! I see the Apple gray start-up screen. It doesn't recognize the keyboard. It asks me to press the key to the right of the left shift (z), then the key to the left of the right shift (/), and it now recognizes it as a 102 key keyboard. Mouse and keyboard work fine. Has no Internet, which I figured. I shut it down, I go get my 25-foot network cable I purchased, plug it into the switch - I have a switch and a router - and plug the other end into the Ethernet port. I start it up and Safari - Apple's web browser - can now reach the Internet. (Since OS X is a derivative of BSD I knew I had to restart the machine to get it to use the Ethernet because - unlike Windows, which recognizes that networking is available as soon as a network cable is plugged in - the Ethernet daemon doesn't start if no connection is detected and I have no idea how to get it to start otherwise.) So I use Safari to download Firefox and install it so I can download other things because I'm more familiar with working with Firefox on Windows and how it works. But I want to figure out how to get the machine to recognize Windows networking so that I can download things to my Buffalo NAS because the Buffalo is a 1 TB drive with 500GB free; the Mac only has 80GB with about 66 free, I only want to store what I have to on it. Plus this way the Mac can also read my video and music library on the NAS. It has a built-in speaker on the front, for playing sounds it's okay but if I wanted to really listen to music a real set of speakers or headphones would be better. The Mac has a "dock" which is like the taskbar on windows. It has "System Preferences" in the dock, which is the same as Windows Control Panel. By enabling Windows Sharing I can access the Buffalo NAS to save files. So I am installing a bunch of things and we'll see how it goes. Oh, have to see how it handles plugging in a jump drive or external hard drive. I did; I plugged a 16-GB USB thumb drive, after a few seconds an icon of a removable drive appears with "No Name" as its identifier which is probably right, and double-clicking on it opens Finder, which is similar to Windows Explorer, and I can see files on it. Also need to see if the webcam I bought from Radio Shack a few months ago for $20 that worked on Windows out of the box <i>without installation of drivers or any software whatsoever</i> will do the same on the Mac. It also apparently supports using VNC directly, (VNC is an open-source program and protocol to remote view and control a computer) which means I think I can set it up headless and just connect to its desktop over the network instead of needing it to be regularly connected to a monitor. I installed both Apache Open Office and the Inkscape SVG editor. For PowerPC processors running OS X 10.4 Inkscape wants the optional version of X Windows installed - as opposed to the standard X Windows setup - which Apple apparently only includes on the installation DVD which was not included with this machine, but someone has made it available to download (since X Windows is licensed for unrestricted distribution there really is no legitimate reason for Apple to restrict it.) I loaded an Open Office document from the Buffalo NAS I'd been editing in Windows and used Inkscape to open an SVG file stored on the Buffalo as well. Also something else interesting, DVI has priority with my monitor, when both are hooked up, if the DVI goes dark because the Mac shuts down or drops signal to the monitor, if there's a signal on the VGA it will bring that up. If the DVI becomes live, the monitor switches to that instead, which is pretty slick. I have another mouse around here so I might just keep a keyboard and mouse on it and the keyboard and mouse on the KVM, if I don't figure out how to set it up headless and use the network to control it with a keyboard and mouse on another machine and the video sent remotely.. [/quote]