Brian's new Mac Mini

Those of you who peruse the other Daynotes Gang sites may have seen that Brian Bilbrey got himself a Mac Mini. I sent the following to the Daynotes Backchannel this morning:

Welcome aboard the OS X train, Brian. A steward will be along with the Kool-Aid shortly. :-)

So did you add any options like more RAM or bigger HDD?

I think you'll like it. There are a large number of open source and free (as in beer) apps you can run on OS X. You can install many of these through the Darwin Ports system (http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/) or Fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net/).

Your favorite, Emacs is already installed by default.

I like iTerm (http://iterm.sourceforge.net/) as a Terminal.app replacement. It's more configurable and supports tabs. However, sometimes if I want to SSH into a *NIX box and need use of the function keys (e.g., for Midnight Commander or YaST), I launch X11.app and an Xterm.

Fugu (http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/) is a nice GUI front end to SCP and SFTP.

I use RBrowser Lite (http://www.rbrowser.com/) for FTP. If you license it, it'll handle SCP and SFTP, too.

ZTerm (http://homepage.mac.com/dalverson/zterm/) is a good terminal emulator if you need to console into a router or switch.

Adium (http://www.adiumx.com/) is based on Gaim but uses an Aqua interface. If you don't need the IM protocols is supports, then iChatAV is a very good AIM and Jabber client. IChatAV's voice support is excellent, at least when talking Mac-to-Mac. IM me if you want to try it.

Flip4Mac (http://www.flip4mac.com/wmv.htm) is a plugin that'll let you play .WMV files in Quicktime. MS dropped development of Windows Media Player for Mac (no great loss, it sucked anyway).

If you need a VNC viewer, check out Chicken of the VNC (http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/).

OpenOffice.org works ok on a Mac with X11, or you can try NeoOffice/J. I find the latter even slower than regular OO.o. I confess I generally use MS Office 2004; Office is nicer on the Mac than on Windows IMO and gives me 100% document exchangeability with Windows users at work.