37 new of 68 responses total.
Or install real Linux on them and help them out even more. Fixing people up with telnet screws them over.
Linux installed to hard drive has plenty of space for ssh (dbclient) and it is quite real. What I use is much faster than the commercial versions.
That's good!
I got Russian working with links browser (which is graphical with embedded images but uses console fonts). And Russian streaming audio. A 486 would be perfect for this but we don't have any left.
I don't have any 486 boxes either, but at least it's possible to build energy-efficient modern PCs now. Not sure whether any of those are reaching the curbside yet though.
humm. I run FreeBSD and drive a Jeep. Okay.
...Oh I get it. I like things for which there is a ton of free documentation on how to modify for my own use. :D
We measured energy use and a 486 beats a 386 or a pentium. The earliest pentiums were less energy efficient than slightly later ones. Faster cpus use more energy.
That's not always the case. Thankfully sanity prevailed at Intel and even AMD have some modern, fast chips that burn less power than predecessors.
Less than a 486?
Possibly. Have you looked at Intel Atom? For less than
$120 it's possible to buy a mainboard with an Atom processor
soldered to it and 2 Gbytes of RAM.
I can see that rescuing curbside 486 machines costs less
and keeps them from the landfill. RAM and disk capacity
limitations might be a drawback though.
This being the MacOS X Leopard item, I should probably
mention that one of the Darwin ports (I /think/ only Pure-
Darwin survives) might work on the Atom board. There are
several non-Darwin desktop BSDs and Linux of course as
alternatives.
Has anybody else upgraded to Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) yet? I did, the day it was released. Risky move, I know - did it for 10.5 but ended up going back to 10.4 (Tiger) until certain issues were resolved. But advance reviews indicated that Snow Leopard was largely glitch-free and involved mostly under-the-hood revisions, not user interface stuff, so I took a chance. Overall I'm really pleased with Snow Leopard. It takes up less disk than Leopard (saved me about 7 GB). The system boots faster - just over a minute, instead of the 2-3 minutes that Leopard took. Applications open and close faster - especially noticeable in the Mail app. Time Machine backups are faster. Although there are no radical changes to the user interface, there are some nice enhancements. For example, the the Airport drop-down menu displays signal strengths for the networks it can see. Also, when you open a dock folder in "grid" view, you can go to subfolders and stay in grid view (which should have been the case all along, of course). Snow Leopard runs only on Intel Macs, and so marks the end of Apple support for the Power PC architecture. For an exhaustive detailed review of Snow Leopard, see John Siracusa's writeup in Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars
There is a Mac OS X item in micros cf (I mention this because I ask questions there but noone ever answers them, and I'd like others to hang out there too.) I've stayed with OS 10.4.11 having heard those bad things about 10.5. But I'd be a little worried about going to 10.6 because of the possibility of other apps I have not working in it.
I'll check out the Micros item. OS X 10.5 was a bit flaky when it first come out, but that was a couple of years ago. There have been several updates, and the current version is quite solid. With 10.5, Spotlight works pretty well, and you also get Time Machine, Apple's great incremental backup system. I wouldn't hesitate to upgrade to 10.5 at this point. However, if you have 3rd party software that's important to you, it's probably wise to check first that it runs under 10.5.
Your OS decreased in size and saved you 7GB? Woah.
Yep, 10.6 uses significantly less disk space than 10.5. That's the opposite of the way things usually go with an OS upgrade. Part of the savings is due to dropping Power PC support.
How big is 10.6?
(Way more than will fit onto a 3.5" floppy disk.)
It comes on a DVD with a capacity of 6.74 GB, of which 6.65 GB is actually used. It's hard to tell how that translates to actual hard disk storage once it's installed, though. Apple's official "Technical Requirements" page (http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html) specifies 1GB minimum memory and 5GB minimum disk space.
I'm still running 10.5 on a machine that came with it. I've been holding off on 10.6 until some of the inevitable bugs fixes come out. 10.6.1 is out now, but I'm still not particularly motivated to implement the change. I think that when I do go to 10.6, I'll first wipe my Time Machine drive and do a Carbon Copy Clone, and then start fresh with Time Machine after the upgrade. Aside from the speed, I should save a bunch of disk space on backups.
I did a Carbon Copy Clone of my 10.5 before upgrading, but didn't wipe Time Machine. Always anxious to be on the cutting edge, I've upgraded to 10.6.1. No differences that I can notice.
What is Time Machine?
Time Machine is an incremental backup system for OS X. Google os+x+time+machine for detailed info.
What do you back up other than personal data?
Time Machine backs up the entire system.
By the way, Snow Leopard is up to 10.6.4 now and extremely stable. I've been reading David Pogue's excellent book "Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual". In spite of the fact that I've been an OS X user for over six years, I've learned quite a bit from it. Keyboard shortcuts in particular. For instance, you get useful extra info about your wifi connection if you hold down the 'option' key when clicking on the Airport icon in the menu bar. Or notice what happens when you press 'option' when the Apple dropdown menu is visible. Clicking on a application in the dock while holding down 'option' or 'command' or 'option+command' also has useful effects. And there are key combinations for logging off, sleeping, restarting, or shutting down without confirmation, if you're in a hurry. Okay, so I'm a keyboard trivialist. But I find that keyboard shortcuts, once they become familiar, can really speed up my work.
Ctrl-Alt-Del does not seem to work on a Mac. OS 10.4 Ctrl-F2 down arrow to shutoff. Is there some keyboard way to bring up a pseudoterminal?
No default way that I'm aware of. If the OS version has Spotlight, you can probably hit command-space to invoke it, then type "terminal" followed by return to start the Terminal application. Once the Terminal application is open, you can select it via command-tab, then type command-N to open a new terminal window.
What is Spotlight and how would I know if OS 10.4 has it? Can I start a browser the same way?
OS 4 has spotlight - a search app. But you can put Terminal and browsers in the dock, and open them that way.
How do you access the 'dock' with the keyboard? I finally figured out that Ctrl-F2 gets you the menu and you can arrow down a few times to Shut Down. How do I access Spotlight with keyboard in the first place? Today I had a fight with OS 9. Can't find any telnet program so I download Nifty Telnet. In order to put on OS 10.3 we would have to disassemble the Bondi Blue G3 233MHz and find two 64MB PC66 SODIMMs. Anyone have extras? I don't want to use up our last two on a giveaway computer. 9.22 works with iCab 3 or IE 5 and they give up on a lot of javascript. 10.3 will work with Seamonkey 1.1, Firefox 2, iCab 4.8, Opera 9. 10.3 needs 128MB.
There is the Nifty Telnet-SSH client for OS-9.
That is what I downloaded (see #62). There is also a free virtual keyboard for OS 9 (not OS 10, which comes with one that is not as good), and I put it on a computer given to us with no keyboard, that went to kids for online games.
Re resp:62 - "How do you access the 'dock' with the keyboard?" Try Ctrl-F3. "How do I access Spotlight with keyboard...?" Cmd-Space. (The David Pogue book I mentioned above has answers to these questions and more, although it's specific to Snow Leopard, so there are a number of things in it that won't work on 10.4. An earlier edition specific to 10.4 probably exists.)
As of right now the AADL has two copies of Pogue's _Mac OS X, Tiger Edition: The Missing Manual_ available at the downtown branch. Here is a link: http://www.aadl.org/catalog/record/1243414 I've found Pogue's books to be a great help.
I presume I can set up my own keyboard shortcuts somehow, such as Ctrl-F4 to access a terminal window where I can type in the name of a program.
Apple is hosting a media event on Wednesday, October 20. Rumor has it that it's to announce the next version of OS X (10.7) and that it will be named "Lion". http://www.tuaw.com/2010/10/13/apple-media-event-on-october-20/
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