Dustin’s Blog

Early in March I decided to give Leopard another try on my mini. There have been a few updates, namely the graphics update and 10.5.2, that were rumored to fix the issues I was having. After a couple of weeks with Leopard, I again removed it in favor of Tiger (10.4). Either there are problems with Leopard or OS X is the most finicky operating system I’ve ever used (people tell me to reinstall).

I just can’t get used to the look of Leopard, the darker gray with the even whiter menus is just too harsh. I had apps that would crash repeatedly at random times. Thunderbird would sometimes crash while checking mail and Firefox or iTerm would crash when the system was resumed.

Ok, so iTerm, Firefox and Thunderbird aren’t Apple apps, people writing the software should make sure it works with Leopard right? Well it wasn’t just third party apps that went haywire on me. iMovie 08 would start, but nothing would show up. The menu bar would be iMovie, the app was running, but there was no actual window to work in. I reinstalled iMovie and it worked just once. Loading it again resulted in the same issue.

I also found that I ran out of memory far faster in Leopard than in Tiger. There *is* a lot more to Leopard but the difference was too much for me to handle. In the end, I’ve concluded that Leopard is either not right for me or it isn’t a good fit on the generation of Mac mini that I own.

I’ve been using my Mac Mini as what I’d call my “primary computer” almost from the moment I received it. While I have a laptop that I can use around the house or travel with, I use the Mac because it is so quiet, it’s hooked up to a 22″ screen and because I enjoy the OS X experience. Over the months I’ve managed to find a few software titles that help me get things done.

• iTerm - Nice terminal app that more closely resembles my favorite Windows SSH client, putty. Has tabs, etc
• Firefox - Who doesn’t know what Firefox is?
• Thunderbird - Mail just can’t compete with the speed of Thunderbird for IMAP accounts
• Gamepedia - I play games and I like to track them. There are other software options available, even some more generic but I just like this one
• Adium - Adium is a multi-protocol chat client using the same libraries as Pidgin
• Vienna - Great RSS reader
• Things - Simple way to track…things
• Mythfrontend - MythTV is my DVR of choice and I need a way to access it on the Mac, this it!
• Integrity - This is a simple link checker for OS X, similar to Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Xenu’s Link Sleuth is superior however.
• MacTheRipper - Best DVD ripping tool I’ve found for the Mac
• NeoOffice - This is currently the only way to run OpenOffice “natively” on the Mac. It’s slow but gets the job done
• Remote Desktop Connection - Sometimes you need to access a Windows machine. I use this primarily to connect to my XP VMWare guest running on my Linux server for web site testing
• Macfuse/SSHFS - Nearly identical to fuse and sshfs for Linux
• Transmission and Azureus - One bittorrent client just isn’t enough
• VLC - Great multi-platform video player. Perian is able to install many of the same codecs VLC will play but I have soft spot for VLC