Recently I’ve purchased an used mac mini, this is the last mini with PPC architecture, see below the specs:

Processor: PowerPC @ 1,5 Ghz
RAM: 1Gb (originally 512Mb)
HardDrive: 80Gb
Misc: SuperDrive, WiFi, BlueTooth…

The reason of the buy is basically have a second mac for continuous tasks like downloading security copies of my DVDs. Another utillity I want to put on him is like media center, I know this model can’t handle the HD movies but can do streaming to my xbox360 for example.

So we could get the conclusion this mac are going to be online 24/7 but how can I connect to it? How can I control the status? We’ll cover this questions from now.

First of all, as you may know this model comes with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and I have a macbook with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, the last version of the Apple’s OS comes with a very useful characteristic which is that all the Macs in the same network will discover each other automatically activating a simple option in System Preferences.

Go to “Sharing” in System Preferences and activate “File Sharing” and “Remote Management”. With the first activated, you can see the other mac on your finder, if you don’t see it at first, open a finder and press cmd+shift+k and you may see it, in my case I get a window like this:

As you can see Leopard recognizes automatically what kind of mac you have and puts an entry on sidebar

The option “Remote Management” helps to control the mac when you aren’t around and includes the “Screen Sharing” option, if you open mac in your mini you will see something like this:

Now you have a part of finder an option in top of the window called “Share screen” which lets you to see in a new window the mac you pretend to control.

In the next post I’ll write about how to share only one mouse and keyboard with two or more macs in the same network.