By Toxin

Discuss this Article in the Forums

Chapter Three
In which the author fiddles while home burns, learns that enemies do not always remain vanquished, plays with IRC, and eliminates his dependency on CAT5...

Fiddling on the hoof

With the updates completed, it was time to start fiddling with things, just to see what I could break. The updates had interrupted my initial attempt to fix the display resolution, so that became my first mission.

The Contr- System Preferences icon was sitting calmly at one end of the Dock (the OS X equivalent of Quick Launch on a Windows system), or if I was feeling adventurous I could find it by clicking on the little Apple logo in the top-left of the screen. Manuals aside, one can often learn a tremendous amount just by being willing to look around and tinker, and also by being able to remember what changes one has made in the event that it becomes necessary to undo them.

The first option I tried was Desktop & Screen Saver; that's where the settings are in Windows, so it seemed reasonable to check there first. No joy there, so I kept looking. The next culprit looked like being Displays, and sure enough I found what I wanted. I was offered a choice of resolution, colour depth, and refresh rate, just like I was used to seeing in Windows. Unlike Windows, as soon as I clicked on my choice, it took effect instantly. OS X detected my monitor correctly, and only offered me choices which would work with that monitor; I don't know what would happen in the event of being offered choices outside the monitor's tolerances.

No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to recompile your kernel

Display resolution set, I spent some time in System Preferences, checking out each option in turn. The keyboard reared its ugly head once more, as it seemed that the issue of layout had not been fully resolved. Despite having British English as the first entry under Language, and British selected under Input Menu, that pesky @ symbol refused to move to its proper location to the left of the Return key, above the apostrophe. It seemed determined to stay above the number 2, despite my best efforts to convince it otherwise.

Some more time spent using Google eventually revealed the answer. Had I spent money on Apple's own keyboard, all would be fine. Since I hadn't, my only option was to delve into abstruse XML files in an attempt to reconfigure the keyboard to my liking. Tinkerer though I am, that seemed a bit much to expect, and so I was most pleased to find a couple of web pages which addressed the problem and which provided suitable ready-made files to download. One download and logout (or reboot) later, I had a new choice under Input Menu which, when selected, shuffled all the symbols to their proper locations. My keyboard finally worked as desired, and I sang hosannas.

The rest of the System Preferences settings were dispatched in short order, with the only significant change being that I turned off Bluetooth. I'll go back and configure more later, don't you worry.

What are we going to do?

Now that the Mac was up and running, with a working Internet connection (as shown by the automatic updates), it was time to work out just what I wanted to do with it. And, do you know, it wasn't that difficult to decide. What do most people want to do with their computers? They want to look at websites, read their e-mail, chat with their friends, write some letters, listen to music, play some games, maybe even watch a DVD. That's pretty much it. Some people have more demanding requirements, such as movie editing, programming, creating art and music, and more, but most computer users have reasonably simple desires. So I set out to fulfil them.

Web browsing was easy enough. The Mac Mini shipped with Safari already loaded. Sure enough, typing http://www.littlewhitedog.com/ into Safari's address bar brought up the familiar black and orange theme. Music was handled by iTunes, which, like Safari, came pre-loaded. I fancied chilling out to some relaxed tunes while getting to grips with the Mac, so Radioio Ambient's stream was added to my playlist. If I fancied a game or two, the Mac had a selection of games including chess, backgammon and more.

The next challenge was to get into the LittleWhiteDog chatroom. I could have used the Java chat client on this website, but I knew that my friend used the IRC client Colloquy, and I wanted to do the same. I had visions of downloading the source code and wrestling with makefiles and the like, or having to contend with RPM dependencies, but no such luck. All I had to download was a single binary which I could run from anywhere I chose. It defaulted to the desktop, but I figured, even as a newbie, that proper organisation of one's programs and data was probably a good idea and so it got swiftly moved to the Applications folder.

Connecting to the chatroom was as simple as running the program, telling it to connect to #lwd on irc.wasteland.org with my chosen nickname, and sitting back. There were no baroque options as with mIRC, just a basic, no-frills IRC client which did just what I wanted it to do.

Look, ma, no CAT5!

My final trick for my first day of ownership was to get rid of the CAT5 and go wireless, because I had visions of moving the Mac eventually to my bedroom and didn't fancy trailing several yards of CAT5 through my humble abode.

This final stunt served only to reinforce just how polished the Mac experience is. I use WPA2 encryption on my wireless connection. It's probably not unbreakable, but it's good enough to deter both the casual snooper and the clueless novice who simply lets his laptop attach to any available wireless connection without bothering to check whether or not it's actually his. At the time of writing, I can see six different access points and, if I can see them, I know their owners can see mine.

Anyway, since WPA2 is reasonably new, I wondered if the Mac would support it. I've yet to find a Linux distribution which supports WPA out of the box, let alone WPA2, without downloading a baroque beta patch from Sourceforge and then fiddling with incomprehensibly arcane settings to get it to work. OS X is, so I've been told, built on BSD, so to my ignorant mind it seemed reasonable to harbour doubts about it, due to my previous experiences with Linux.

Like Thomas, I should never have doubted. When I was shown a choice of encryption methods, WPA2 was offered, in both Enterprise and Personal configurations. I assumed that Personal was the OS X equivalent of PSK in Windows, and thus it proved. All I had to do was provide my router's SSID and WPA2 key, and the Mac connected to my wireless router on the first try.

My friend, the aforementioned owner of this site, challenged me in the chatroom to write an article about my experience of making the switch from Windows to OS X. It seemed that my next step was to find a word processor...

Stay tuned for the next instalment, in which the author opens his office, bounces some garden gnomes around, nearly throws his webcam through the wall, and nearly throws his external hard disk through the wall, too...

Copyright © by LWD All Rights Reserved.

Published on: 2007-02-19 (1871 reads)