Thursday, November 23, 2006

Mac OS X Hints for an OS 9 User

Congrats on both the OS X Macs. As I've said many times, you won't regret it. We've pretty much never looked back since moving to OS X - and I waited a good 2 years before making the jump.

As I've also said, OS X reliability is fantastic. That's not to say that you won't have crashes, and it's still possible to have conflicts between, say, a piece of hardware and something in the OS. But if you are conservative about what bells and whistles you run (I'm definitely NOT), you probably won't encounter many issues. It's really incredible how different the computing experience *is* after OS 9 (and Windows 95, 98 and XP). I've probably said this before, but I manage 70 eMacs running OS X at [my wife's college lab], and I do literally *nothing* to maintain them. I only spend time when we're changing installed software or operating systems - I do NO troubleshooting or ongoing software maintenance - NONE. (Macs running OS 9 progressively degraded over time, even with users locked out of writing to the boot drives - users of Windows 95/98 will be familiar with this kind of fragility.)

You now have the option to be running Windows on your Intel mini, should you be so inclined - using either Apple's free Boot Camp solution or a commercial solution such as Parallels (unlike Boot Camp, which requires restarting the computer in either OS X or WinXP, Parallels allows the user to launch Windows applications while still running OS X). You'll still have to worry about viruses, worms, spyware and adware on the Windows partition, though. (NOTE: Installing Boot Camp requires formatting the hard drive for two logical partitions.)

I should also mention that now that you have two FireWire Macintoshes, you should absolutely know about "Target Disk Mode." By starting up either of your Macs while holding down the "T" key, that Macintosh will effectively become a FireWire hard drive for that session. The screen will display a solid blue background with a floating yellow FireWire logo, and you'll be able to read/write to/from a connected Mac. OS X also supports networking over FireWire - providing a faster-than-Gigabit Ethernet connection between two Macintoshes. Because either of those Macs can also "share" its Internet connection (which it has established via wired Ethernet, WiFi, or even modem), it's possible in an emergency for two FireWire Macs to share an available Internet connection as well.

This ability to use a Mac as a FireWire hard drive is also extremely useful in that it is very simple to "clone" one Mac to another. You can also clone a Mac to a FireWire hard drive, and boot from the FireWire hard drive - a fantastic utilitarian infrastructure. It means you can have your own "Mac" on a portable hard drive, and boot it on any other (compatible) Mac hardware. This is also an excellent technique for upgrading to a larger hard drive. (I recommend either Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to clone bootable Macintosh volumes.)

Another random thought: you can remotely control one Mac from the other using free software. Download the open-source project Chicken of the VNC and put it on the controlling machine. On the machine to be controlled, in System Preferences:Sharing:Services turn "Apple Remote Desktop" ON, and in "Access Privileges," check "VNC viewers may control screen with password" and give it a good password. Make a note of that computer's "IP address" (in System Preferences:Network) and enter it and the password in Chicken of the VNC at the remote viewing computer.

I manage our mothers' Macs from 2700 miles away using this and similar technology - it's quite sluggish over consumer broadband connections, but much easier than flying round-trip.

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