A linux geek starts playing with a MacMini
We bought a Mac Mini at the office for multiple reasons,
First of all we needed a demo box to carry around to show of MailMuseum to customers, we wanted something small and light as a server. Secondly it seems like the new MacMini's already have a VT Based chip so they should be able to runn Xen in full virtualisation mode. And wel.. If we really have to buy hardware that includes an OS by default ..we prefer buying a Unix platform vs sending money to Redmond. But the goal is to make it a fulltime Linux/Xen platform not a MacOS X box.
www.mactel-linux.org learns you a lot of stuff on how to install Linux and so on.. so I started of by
Connecting the MacMini via FireWire to My Laptop Booted with F pressed thus booted with disk in slave mode , mounted stuff,
I edited partition table.. hmm that should read screwed partition table . Coudn't boot anymore. Booted with install CD. (Press C)
It didn't find a disk anymore .. you need to launch Utilities / Disk Utility from the menu and partition it again .. weird.. it just stops and you have to look in menu's rather than just starting the thing itselve. Hmm.. Linux really is userfriendly at least Linux installers tell me what's the next step and suggest a partition info :)
What ? MacOS needs 15 GB to install, I planned on giving it about 10Gb but that really didn't seem to be enough. Ok so 30 Gb you get .. the rest is for Linux.
While fiddling in the menu I ran into the Startup Disk thingie Hmm.. this thing has an option boot from netwrk.. needs to be figured out ..
Right I`m in wait mode now .. 11% complete ...
Ah now it's done .. it's at 100% and it starts again .. "Writing files"
Oh my .. Installing MacOS X really really takes long, I already experienced it last July when I scratched and reinstalled Macbar's Powerbook but now again I have to realise that Installing Linux is soo much faster and and once again the progress stuff reaches 100% completed .. only to proceed to the next phase...
But.. wait .. now it gives me a Time Remaining: About 1 hour and 23 minutes.
Yeah right.. I`m going to play with my MythTV box
Anyway.. my iMac is still happily running Ubuntu PPC ...