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.

My software update gives me an impressive notice, Java for Mac OS has an update and adds support for Java 6 SE, as the document in apple says, this version doesn’t change the default version of Java which continue being the 1.5 version.

It’s a great notice for Java developers but I think Apple has been a bit late but as we say in Spain, better late than never

This weekend I have installed Leopard on my MacBook, as I have said before, I have been waiting for 10.5.2 update to install it and after 24 hours after installing I have to say it’s a stable operating system.

The installation took me 30 minutes to finish and the first boot was a bit slow but I think it’s normal, then the first thing I did is to update the leopard to 10.5.2, works fine here and then I had the Leopard 10.5.2 OTB (out the box).

The first boot told me if I wanted my external drive as a Time Machine drive but I said no because I have a poor free size, so I’ll wait to free some space to try Time Machine. When all goes fine was time to install some apps, the most important or the apps I recommend are:

• Onyx: Repair permissions, improve the health of operating systems used periodically. Visit here.
• Growl: Notifications of all the events in the apps installed. Visit here.

What I like of Leopard is the new stacks, I have all my apps or movies in the dock and I can explore them when I want. With Quick Look is so easy to show your photos or make a presentation. Spaces, I have to say I come from Linux and always had more than one desktop, bring it to Leopard are perfect for me!

What I don’t like are a little bugs Leopard still have and specially the software that are trying to adapt the code to the “new” OS, like GrowlMail or Azureus, I have to say that GrowlMail isn’t compatible with Leopard but I got some crashes from these two apps. What I’m really worried about, is from the crashes of Mail, when sync with my imap server I got two crashes but seems fine now and I don’t get it anymore.

For now it’s all I can say, after 24 hours I think is a poor analysis but enough for the small time I have tried.

The opinion of the users about the last Leopard update 10.5.2 are a bit confusing, resolved but new bugs too are coming with this version.

There are many bugs resolved and the best, is that Apple seems to hear their customers. One of the first complaints was the new feature stacks and the missing folder list in it, a more common view of the stacks like a contextual menu:

The next feature is the new finder icon of Time Machine shich let the user make the backup almost instantly or check the last backup done.

And in my opinion, the best feature Apple could do, activate or deactivate the translucent menu bar. The ‘new’ translucent menu bar was the most feature discussed around the web with a lot of complaints, too many for Apple and the developers though is better the optional way.

And the last most remarkable new feature, share optic unit to support the new Macbook Air lack of CD/DVD.

But not all are good news, as always the new software fixes bugs but do new too, and the 10.5.2 update comes with a new bugs like problems starting up, Mail.app, wifi, trackpad, mice… you can find a list of this bugs in MacFixit, here and here.

The images over these lines are from ArsTechnica and its analysis.

Apple just releases the very expected update for Mac OS X Leopard.  This is a very large update which size it’s 341Mb and fixes a lot of changes, 180+.

In my opinion this is the real Mac OS X Leopard, the OS that Steve Jobs wanted to release as the first version but it isn’t because another delay would be horrible to the comapny image and the shares… so he prefered sell an unfinished OS and shut up some people than sell this final version that sees the light today.

I was waiting for this update since Leopard is out to install it, I had readed some critiques about Leopard and I’d prefer to wait until a very large update comes… and here it is, this weekend I’m going to install Leopard on my Macbook and update to 10.5.2…

Linus Torvalds is the founder of Linux and nowadays he’s on Australia in a conference about Linux.

When he was asked about a comparative between Apple Mac OS X Leopard vs. Microsoft Windows Vista he says Leopard is better than Vista in a some aspects but worse if you are a developer. The file system HFS of the OS X were critiqued too, with his words:

“OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary”

Well, I’m not an expert about FS but what I’ve readed, HFS isn’t the best FS but neither the worst, I think the best FS is which fits on your needs, and HFS fits perfectly on OS X. Yes, Linux has more FS possibilities like XFS, ReiserFS, ext3, etc. and this means more effiency according to your needs.

But I agree with Linus when he says OS X is the worst OS if you want it to develop, the main reason it’s Steve Jobs doesn’t get the last Java version, I think Linus said this because it, but we must wait to the near next release of OS X, 10.5.2 which in my opinion will be included in it.