My essentials for Mac OS 10.3

So, the other day I picked up a gently-used Power Macintosh G4 400MHz for $227.00 off eBay. Yes, this is a gizmo post, so sue me. Anyway, it had a DVD drive (a big plus in my book), Mac OS 9 installed (but no restoration CDs), and according to the seller had a “problem with the hard drive”. He was not sure what the problem was, but after some random time period between a few minutes to a few hours, the operating system would report that it couldn’t read the hard drive and die.

Sure enough, when I received the unit and disconnected my kids computer to hook up my new toy, it had this weird behavior. Disabling extensions didn’t seem to help. So I bought Mac OS 10.3 (Panther, which as of this writing is the “latest and greatest” Apple operating system) from CompUSA for $134.00 (people have informed me I way overpaid for the OS, but, well, I could get it that day that way, and in a retail box with support and everything), took it home, slapped in an old hard drive I had laying around, pillaged memory from my kids’ computer, installed it…

And whaddya’ know? It works great.

So the point of this post is to outline some of what I consider “essential” utilities to enjoy my Mac. For certain applications, I’ve had to hunt down the odd helper app or two to figure out how to use my Mac in “unique” ways. The cool thing is, even without the knicknacks, Mac OS X comes with a ton of useful stuff that covers most of my day-to-day activities; for the things that require specialized software or hardware, like my multitrack studio recording, I still have to use the Redmond operating system.

• OpenOffice.org. OK, I admit it. I’m a cheapskate. If I can avoid paying for something, legally, I will. However, as my subscriptions to Transgaming WineX, Crossover Office, and frequent computer software purchases attest, I’m not averse to supporting software that supports my interests.

  Anyway, OpenOffice.org has everything I need for day-to-day office work. I’m a sysadmin, not an analyst or professional typesetter, so I’ve found it to be an ideal word-processing and spreadsheet platform. Occasionally, I’ve run into weirdness with importing or exporting Microsoft Word .doc documents, but lately that’s becoming more and more rare as OpenOffice.org improves the product.

• Fink. If there ever were to be an essential administration toolkit for UNIX administrators working on a Mac OS box, this would be it. They ported Debian GNU/Linux‘s “apt” utility to Mac OS X, along with a boatload of GNU, free software, and open source software. Combined with X-Windows that ships with Panther, I can have nearly any utility that I’m used to up and running on my Mac in moments — long enough for a download of the application and any dependencies. Installation was painless, and unlike Cygwin (a UNIX-like environment that runs under Microsoft Windows), there’s no weirdness with file permissions or illegal names. Mac OS X is UNIX under the hood, and I’ve already built several utilities not made for it that work just fine under it.
• Patchburn II. iTunes, Apple’s all-in-one music ripper, player, and online music store, is a wonderful application. When I compare it to hideos abortions like MusicMatch, which combine crashiness, bloat, and poor usability in one disgusting blob, I just go ‘wow, how did I ever do without a good MP3 jukebox?’

  Unfortunately, there was one problem: my brand-new HP dvd420e (alternately, “dvd 420e”) 8x DVD+-RW Firewire/USB2.0 drive wasn’t supported natively by iTunes. So I couldn’t burn my purchases from the Apple Music Store to CD and take them with me easily. What a bummer. I downloaded Weird Al Yankovic‘s “A Complicated Song” and “Ebay” as my very first purchases, and was sad that I couldn’t burn them to play on our CD player.

  Anyway, that’s where Patchburn II comes in. Although it’s “beta” (read: potentially unstable) software, it seems to work well enough. You simply run the utility, and, if it recognizes your drive, it will allow you to install a driver for it that is supported in iTunes and iDVD. One reboot later, and I was easily, and trivially, burning my MP3 and M4P (Apple DRM protected files) to CD. Stuck ’em in the CD player in the kitchen, and it was a beautiful thing. I’d literally been hunting, on and off, for days looking for a way to make my DVD burner work with iTunes, and I’m glad I found one.

• Mozilla Thunderbird. This email reader is simply the best-in-class. Although I goofed around with Apple’s “Mail” application, it just didn’t do the trick; it was slower on my large IMAP mailbox than Thunderbird, didn’t have as good of junk mail filtering, and had some very unusual user interface choices in identifying new messages (read: no highlighting!) that I immediately was turned off. Thunderbird on Mac OS X is every bit as good as it is on other platforms, and was surprisingly responsive on this aging Power Mac.
• iPhoto. I can’t improve on this built-in photo app. Some people have complained of slow performance, but even on an individual library with several thousand photos, performance was choppy but acceptable. Maybe I’m just used to working on crappy 700MHz-class PCs and the 400MHz G4 is actually faster, but regardless I really like it. One day soon, I must try out their online photo printing service. Anyway, absolutely killer app that makes Microsoft’s “My Photos” folder look rather under-featured.
• Using the gimp-print drivers without any configuration was just awesome. I have an HP Laserjet 4 SI laser printer with duplexer (a big, 100+ lb beast in my basement), and it was so nice to just put in the IP address, pick a usable driver, and have the OS do the rest. I did buy the Postscript upgrade card for the printer so that I can do real Postscript printing rather than printing pictures of my rasters, but they both are quite usable for my light printing needs.

Anyway, I’m certain that eventually the honeymoon will be over with my “new” (to me) machine, but for the time being, I’m definitely liking it. I have a fully-featured, fast command shell (which is important for me as a UNIX admin), access to all the usual free software utilities to which I’m accustomed, and an extremely well-designed user interface (oh, man, comparing Apple’s “Dock” to the taskbar in Windows… wow, what a bunch of better-made choices) that even my kids can pick up on in short order… well, it’s a lot of fun.

Things I’m still looking for:

• The “Classic” environment install, from a retail box Mac OS X to a clean hard disk, is a pain. It would be very nice if there was some all-in-one Classic zip download from Apple so I don’t have to install an old hard drive, zip up the OS 9 System folder (a whopping 300+ megabytes), and then unzip it to Mac OS X in order to run kids’ games and old Mac-compatible applications.
• A good primer on Python programming using “cocoa”, the Mac OS X GUI toolkit. Haven’t dug very hard yet.
• An inconspicuous, wireless way of pumping tunes from my Mac to another room. The Airport Express with AirTunes seems like a reasonable possibility there, but it’s incompatible with my existing 802.11b wireless network — ugh. $$$$$ to upgrade…
• A cheap 802.11g/b non-USB adapter (maybe PCI or FireWire?) for my Mac. I don’t want USB, because this old Mac only has USB 1.0 — or a maximum throughput of about 10 megabits/sec. Rather slow if I were to upgrade to 802.11g @ 50 megabits/sec. Firewire’s 400mbits/sec throughput would be really reasonable, though. And forward-compatible should I ever upgrade my Mac.
• An in-line spellchecker in my browser. KDE‘s “Konqueror” has had this for a while if you have ispell (or is it aspell?) installed: it highlights possibly misspelled words in your text window, which would have been a great thing for this blog posting.
• Network hotsync for my Palm Tungsten C. That is one of very few annoyances I have moving from Microsoft PC-land: the Palm Desktop for Mac OS X doesn’t support network hotsync. I’m used to just walking into my house and pressing the hotsync button; my Tungsten then hooks up to my wireless network, finds my PC, and syncs up. It’s much faster than syncing via a USB cradle, and far more convenient. Though I use the cradle for recharging anyway, and it’s now hooked up to my Mac, I miss the speed of wireless hotsync.
• Better keyboard and mouse. The hockey-puck mouse is annoyingly small for my hand. I don’t care to have fifty buttons on my mouse, and Goodness knows my children have a hard time remembering right-click, left-click, middle-click, but a scroll wheel is handy 🙂 And though the keyboard is a pretty translucent deal, it’s rather small and uncomfortable to use for extended periods (except in my lap; maybe a wireless keyboard, eh?).
• A way to access the F9, F10, F11, and other special buttons using a mouse/keyboard combination. Maybe I just haven’t found it yet, but I use the F9 (show all windows as small versions of themselves to find the right window) and F11 (move all windows offscreen temporarily) keys a LOT. It would be nice for them to be where I don’t have to look at my keyboard to use them.

That’s it for now. Overall, for the UNIX or GNU/Linux administrator, Mac OS X is an excellent choice of operating system to take care of business. For those, like me, at home on the command line, the pretty GUI is a nice, usable bonus. For people like my wife and kids, I think this system approaches nirvana of usability at the moment. It was trivial to hook up my digital camera and have the computer “do the right thing”, and equally trivial to do most other things — except try to hook up an unsupported Firewire external DVD drive.