The adventures of a seasoned Windows user with his new Mac Mini
By Toxin
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Chapter Four
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...
It seems that X is more than just
the operating system
While fiddling with
Finder, I, er, found a program called TextEdit. I briefly
contemplated writing this series using it, but swiftly banished such
thoughts in favour of OpenOffice. If this was being written on a
Windows system I would hardly use Notepad, would I? The Mac shipped
with a trial version of Mac Office 2004, but I didn't even bother
trying it. After all, the purpose of this exercise was to discover if
I can break my dependency on Microsoft products and get to grips with
something else.
Sure enough, the
OpenOffice website had a version available for the Mac. There was one
small snag: there was not a proper port to OS X and the current
version was dependent on the X11 windowing system. Thanks to the
comprehensive – and simple – instructions on the
OpenOffice site, I swiftly found the X11 package on one of the discs
which came with the Mac, installed it, and downloaded and installed
the OpenOffice package. Despite my nervous thoughts about
dependencies, especially on X11, the installation and subsequent use
was as smooth as could be desired. The OpenOffice developers should
be commended for it.
Bouncing garden gnomes for fun and,
well, just fun really
Elsewhere on this
website you can read a review of the game Jardinains 2, written
by yours truly. I was rather taken by the game, and remembered that
the developer had produced a version for the Mac. The license I'd
purchased meant that I could merrily download any of the available
versions without paying another penny. Well, that opportunity was far
too good to pass up, so I grabbed it and spent an hour or so happily
bouncing garden gnomes around before pondering what to do next.
What's the dmg, guvnor?
Many Mac
applications come pre-packaged in a file with the extension dmg.
This can be considered analogous to an ISO image of a CD. These
packages must be mounted as a volume in Finder before you can peruse
their contents. OS X handles the mounting automatically. Once
mounted, they can be browsed like any other storage volume on the
system. A dmg package might contain a single binary file to
copy to the Applications folder, or there may be an entire
installation routine held therein, reminiscent of a Setup program in
Windows.
Compatible with OS X, my foot
Some of my friends
use the VoIP program Skype, a version of which is available for OS X,
and I wanted to join them. I also wanted to get my webcam to work
with Skype and, as luck would have it, I'd chosen a camera whose
manufacturer provided suitable drivers for OS X. Or so I thought. The
dmg package appeared to install successfully, and the monitor
program told me that a Sonix camera was connected, but would not
display a picture. I tried the camera in my Windows laptop, and it
worked perfectly. On the Mac I saw only a black square. Unplugging
and reconnecting the camera fixed nothing. Reinstalling the driver
package made a slight difference, in that now the monitor program
crashed when asked to work with the camera. Likewise, Skype also
crashed when asked to play nice with the webcam.
This was most
irksome indeed, although a more objective view would contend that
this was not the end of the world.. There are other webcams out there
should I strike out with this one. I have submitted a support query
to the manufacturer but will have to wait until the Chinese New Year
celebrations have finished and the business reopens. Perhaps the
webcam is shot, although this is unlikely given that it works with
Windows. Perhaps the drivers are poor. Perhaps the fault is mine, and
there is something I should do to fix it, something which is hampered
by my lack of knowledge. No matter; I decided to put the webcam aside
and concentrate on getting other things to work.
A cybernetic duck
By this point I'd
almost completed my list of typical user requirements. Configuring
e-mail was a trivial task, even easier than configuring Thunderbird.
DVD-watching was taken care of by iDVD. I'd already used Safari,
Jardinains 2, OpenOffice and iTunes, and... ah, yes. iTunes. I had
only one streaming radio station added to my playlist so far, and
wanted to augment that with my not inconsiderable music collection.
I've an external
250GB USB 2.0 hard disk, formatted as NTFS, which currently holds a
backup of my entire music collection. Surely, I thought to myself, it
would be a simple matter of plugging it in and browsing the
newly-detected volume. OS X must be able to read NTFS, no? Well,
apparently OS X does have rudimentary read-only support for NTFS, but
no ability to write to it. This was fine for my purposes, since I had
no wish to change the contents of the disk, merely to read them.
Although I had read
that OS X could understand NTFS, I was unable to view the contents of
the hard disk. The disk mounted, apparently successfully, OS X told
me that it was an NTFS volume, it told me what the capacity was and
how much free space remained, but did not show me the contents.
Evidently it saw something, but precisely what escaped me. As of this
writing I have not yet solved the problem. Still, as with the webcam,
it's irksome but not the end of the world. No doubt I will discover
the answer in the end, and I suspect it, too, will have something to
do with my current lack of knowledge.
Having given up on
listening to anything other than Radioio Ambient for the time being,
I set my sights on one more function: FTP. FileZilla appeared to be
Windows-only, so off I went in search of a suitable alternative for
the Mac. I found loads, and by this point I didn't feel inclined to
try them all to see which one suited me, so I cheated. I asked my Mac
Mini-owning friend for his recommendation. He pointed me towards a
lovely little program called Cyberduck. I've no idea how its complete
feature set compares to that of FileZilla, but it's certainly
adequate enough for my basic needs.
I was almost done.
I had the basics working, and just had a couple of minor irritations
to troubleshoot. Then my eyes fell on my printer and scanner...
Stay tuned for the next instalment,
in which the author nearly strangles Auntie, scans and prints a train
ticket, fixes his mouse buttons, and draws some conclusions...
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