|
|
|
|
 |
For my birthday on October 3rd I visited the Apple Store Online, and with a few mouse clicks spent a frightening amount of money. I bought the G4 Dual Processor 800Mhz machine, with the Superdrive, the nifty video card you can use to run two monitors, provided one is a flat panel and the other a regular CRT, two internal 60GB hard drives, and 256MBs of RAM. But where I went over the top in self-indulgence was getting the Apple Cinema Display flat panel monitor. Oh vanity of vanities! Oh frailty, thy name is Francine! Needless to say I'm completely in love and have spent endless hours since it all arrived sitting there in front of my gorgeous monitor Doing Things. In fact, I've spent so many hours sitting there that my left gluteus maximus is sore. I didn't know you could injure yourself by sitting, but you can. |
Jon Chaplin called the other day to see what I was up to. When he found out he said, "You are going to get your system so screwed up...." Well, yeah, of course. That is why the first thing I tried to do, after upgrading from the installed OSX 10.0.4 to 10.1 (not installed, but the upgrade CD arrived with the machine), was figure out how to make an exact copy of the system, install it on the second drive, and boot therefrom. That way if I managed to make the system on drive 1 unworkable I could push the reset button, hold down the option key, and switch to another boot drive with my system and all its configurations, rather than reinstalling everything. Doing this turned out to be a nontrivial exercise in frustration and discovery, and is a topic being discussed quite actively at a number of the online OSX forums. I will report on this in some detail later, once I get all the methods being described to work (so far the only one that has worked for me is one of mine own invention using ResEdit, which doesn't seem to be a popular method, although one guru grudgingly conceded that it ought to work--hey, it DID work!). For now I'll just mention that the old method of moving/copying a system from one place to another, namely selecting the System Folder and dragging it to the new location, doesn't work with OSX. In the first place you can't copy a lot of things because you need administrator privileges, and you can only get them through the Terminal application, which makes it all a UNIX command line operation rather than a Finder operation. In the second place even if you do manage to copy all the files to the new drive the drive won't boot. You get dumped into a blank command line window, headed up by a mysterious error message about the master password file. I discovered OS 9.2.1 would boot from the new location, but not X. So I resorted to the simple, but time consuming, expedient of just running the Installer for the second drive, and reentering all my configuration information (you know, your ISP info and all like that). I did it this way since I was eager to get started playing with the system, and was afraid I might break something while figuring out how to do an exact copy of my running system. Therefor I wanted a backup system in place and working before I started mucking about. By the way, it took 2 hours to do the install/configuration thing, versus a matter of minutes for the old method.
OS X is definitely a brave new world, and one with a number of hitherto unseen bugs as well as new terrain and new possibilities. For me it is a wonderland, as I can play with the MacOS and a UNIX OS simultaneously. In case you haven't heard, OS X is based on the BSD operating system, which is one flavor of UNIX--slightly different in the way it operates from Linux (which I have played with a little bit), but still a UNIX system.
|
With the Cinema Display and a Sony 17" CRT. This was taken before I applied the Apple decal to the sound hole. What was Apple thinking? |
 |
The Beige Box, to which the SCSI devices are connected, as well as the other Sony 17" display. It also has the ADB Wacom tablet. |
The new organization of the Mac begins with the hardware, which is controlled by Apple's Darwin OS. Darwin is made up of several elements, including (but not limited to): the Mach kernel, which connects the OS to the hardware; the Berkeley Software Distribution, which is the open source UNIX operating system, and provides file system management and networking services; and the Virtual File System, which allows the Mac to access hard drives in many formats. Next there is a graphics layer, which includes Quartz, OpenGL and Quicktime, and enables all the fancy GUI stuff you see, like the pulsing buttons in dialog boxes and the dancing Dock. And of course what you see, the pretty windows and what not, are produced by the Aqua interface. By the way, if all those pretty blue colors are more annoying than helpful you can turn them off. In months to come I'll be telling you how to customize all sorts of things.
OK, you've launched OS X and you are in the Finder. The Apple Menu is at the upper left corner of your monitor, and when you click on it you discover it isn't the real Apple Menu at all. Aside from "About This Mac" as the first item, there is little else in common with the old Apple Menu. Most significantly, and annoyingly, you can't do a thing to this menu except use it as is. The old functions of the Apple Menu, where you could add anything you wanted, have been taken over by the Dock. You'll see it at the bottom of your screen. It will be big, it will contain the Trash, and when you run your mouse over it it will do amazing gyrations. You decide you really don't want it to do that stuff, and you don't particularly like it at the bottom of the screen, and there is almost nothing in it that you want to use, and it doesn't have things in it that you do want to use. What to do?
Return to the pseudo-Apple Menu and select System Preferences... You will see a little icon (or actually a rather large icon, since we haven't changed the default yet) suddenly appear in the Dock and bounce up and down joyously a few times, then a window will open with lines of icons organized in rows for Personal, Hardware, Internet and Network, and System. This is where what were once the control panels now live. The second icon in the Personal row is called Dock. Click on it, and the contents of the window are replaced with choices you can make about the Dock and its behavior. There is a slider which you drag to make the icons a more reasonable size. You can turn that "grow as the mouse passes over" business off by unchecking the magnification box, or leave it checked but minimize or maximize just how big things get. You can choose to have the Dock hide itself away until you mouse over its location, whereupon it will reappear, and you can specify whether you want that location to be along an edge or at the bottom. When you click a window's minimize button, causing that window to vanish from the screen and reappear as a Dock icon instead, you can have it shrink into place rather than do that cutesy curvy trip thing Apple is so proud of. Just choose Scale Effect instead of Genie Effect in the drop down menu. And finally, you can tell your launching applications not to do their "Joy Joy Bounce" dance by unchecking the Animate opening applications button. Click the close button of the System Preferences window and your choices are now active. You will notice, unless you decided to hide the Dock, that the System Preferences icon is still in the Dock, and it has a little black triangle thingy next to it, as does the Finder icon, and you may see other icons with the triangle as well. This is the indicator for a running application. Every application that is currently running will be in the Dock with that triangle, whether any windows are open in the application or not. Just click on the icon to bring the application to the front. If you click on the System Prefs icon now a new Prefs window will open.
It is not necessary for you to manage the RAM usage of anything anymore. OS X does that for you. You can leave applications open when you aren't using them and their share of RAM is given to other applications that are active. You no longer need to quit and restart applications in order to have enough RAM to do things. You also no longer assign RAM to applications in the Get Info window, the OS itself assigns memory on the basis of which needs what at any given time. Pretty neat! I enjoy watching the OS shutdown and close the dozen or so applications I usually have running--my Dock is on the right edge of the screen, and the icons disappear, blip blip blip, and the Dock shrinks as the computer shuts down. Kind of entertaining. OK, so I'm easily entertained.
plorations
