Post by Roger BinnsTo be honest I detest MacOS and find it very user hostile. I first used
it in 1985, and find that to be true even today.
1985 bears no resemblance to today in terms of MacOS. However, I'm
still open to the fact that you'll despise it after working with it
when your new box arrives. :-) I find Linux to be very user hostile,
but geek friendly, so go figure.
Post by Roger BinnsI have two reasons for doing some Mac stuff myself.
I understand completely, Roger, and I hope you didn't think I was the
least bit slighted by any of this. Even if I had a large chunk of time
to put into the project, I would commend you for wanting to have
first-class hands-on experience with how the Mac port is functioning.
Post by Roger BinnsThe real question is how many different versions of MacOS do I want to
deal with. I am going to limit it to two, which will initially be
10.3 and 10.4. (Do you have any pointers on how to setup a machine so
I can make it multi-boot with completely independent partitions for
each version?)
If I had my druthers, I wouldn't be building for Jaguar any longer.
But, there is demand, so I do it. :-) It's VERY unfortunate that Apple
is going to really irritate you when they ask you to pay them $129 in a
few months to buy a copy of Tiger. I almost ordered a Mac mini myself
when I saw them, to use as a central backup server and media device,
but then common sense got the better of me and I thought I would wait
until it's shipping with Tiger. There will most likely (I almost can
guarantee this) be ABSOLUTELY NO DISCOUNT on the purchase price of
Tiger when it's released.
Anyway, to the question at hand... For my Jaguar stuff, I just put a
drive into a cheap firewire enclosure and I boot from that to do Jaguar
work, and I've left my internal drive strictly Panther. However, there
is nothing that would prevent you from partitioning the drive and
easily booting from either partition, it works very well... There is a
preference panel in the system preferences to select which system you
want to boot from, or you can simply hold down the OPTION key on the
keyboard while booting the computer and it will present you with a
graphical picker of partitions with installed versions of the OS to
boot from.
When you get it preloaded, you'll either have to boot from the
included DVD and use the Disk Utility program to repartition it and
then do a restore to the new smaller partition, or you'll have to
purchase a utility program to do a live re-parition... There are no
free tools to do this that I know of on the Mac. If you have some
Linux utility that can repartition HFS+ systems, I'd love to know about
it. :-)
There are two that I know of which are commercially available, both
just under $50:
iParition - http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iPartition.php
VolumeWorks -
http://www.subrosasoft.com/thestore/product_info.php?products_id=431
Given that, I'd just re-install the system myself. :-)
Post by Roger Binns(*) I am busy watching the keynote. Some good stuff there so who knows ...
I'm a musician as well, for me the upgrades to "GarageBand" are the
biggest things coming out of the keynote... Coupled with the Mac mini,
of course.
Steve