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Want to dip my toes into Macintosh waters, but ghetto. How old is too old?
#258938 - 07/03/11 08:48 PM
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From what I've read if I get something with Tiger on it I'll learn enough of the basics of Appledom to jump right into Lion when it comes out.
Then again, I am also a stupidassed noob. 
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italie |
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MAME owes italie many thank yous, hah
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Re: Want to dip my toes into Macintosh waters, but ghetto. How old is too old?
[Re: aavada]
#258942 - 07/03/11 10:42 PM
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> From what I've read if I get something with Tiger on it I'll learn enough of the
> basics of Appledom to jump right into Lion when it comes out.
>
> Then again, I am also a stupidassed noob.
Do you have a spare X86? You could throw Tiger on that. Getting all the drivers working properly will make you an expert in no time.
http://www.osx86.theplaceforitall.com/howto/
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Re: Want to dip my toes into Macintosh waters, but ghetto. How old is too old?
[Re: italie]
#258954 - 07/04/11 01:20 AM
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> Do you have a spare X86? You could throw Tiger on that. Getting all the drivers
> working properly will make you an expert in no time.
>
>
> http://www.osx86.theplaceforitall.com/howto/
Thing is, it'll make you an expert in a bunch of things that you'll never need to do if you were to buy Apple hardware. I know there are legitimate reasons for builing a Hackintosh, but becoming an expert on OSX isn't one.
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| italie |
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MAME owes italie many thank yous, hah
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Re: Want to dip my toes into Macintosh waters, but ghetto. How old is too old?
[Re: Matty_]
#258956 - 07/04/11 01:57 AM
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> > Do you have a spare X86? You could throw Tiger on that. Getting all the drivers
> > working properly will make you an expert in no time.
> >
> >
> > http://www.osx86.theplaceforitall.com/howto/
>
> Thing is, it'll make you an expert in a bunch of things that you'll never need to do
> if you were to buy Apple hardware. I know there are legitimate reasons for builing a
> Hackintosh, but becoming an expert on OSX isn't one.
It'll teach you what a .kext is at least....
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Re: Want to dip my toes into Macintosh waters, but ghetto. How old is too old?
[Re: Matty_]
#258959 - 07/04/11 02:58 AM
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> Thing is, it'll make you an expert in a bunch of things that you'll never need to do
> if you were to buy Apple hardware. I know there are legitimate reasons for builing a
> Hackintosh, but becoming an expert on OSX isn't one.
How about testing iOS SDK and giving support to Mac users once in a while? Right, it's more complex than buying an overpriced real machine and you can't sell whatever you program on a Hackintosh, but the knowledge and research stands. :P
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Re: Want to dip my toes into Macintosh waters, but ghetto. How old is too old?
[Re: italie]
#258961 - 07/04/11 03:24 AM
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> Do you have a spare X86? You could throw Tiger on that. Getting all the drivers working properly will make you an expert in no time.
Thanks for that idea! I know that building a Hackintosh would be a very educational experience and gain me a lot of geek cred, but... that's exactly the kind of crap that I'm trying to get AWAY from.
I'm tired of computers. There, I said it. I'm just fucking tired. I'm tired of having to manually update shit every couple of days. I'm tired of something going wrong and not knowing if it's my hardware, the drivers, the OS, the application itself, or some other application causing problems. I'm tired of spending hours or even multiple evenings researching problems.
Yes, I still get a "Eureka!" moment when I solve a problem but it's just not worth it to me anymore. I need some time off. The Win7 computer that I have now works fine for gaming but it also spews hot air and fan noise into the room nonstop. I catch myself playing games on it less and less so it's just overkill for what I do during a normal day. I use a gaming machine for my personal business so I feel the need to keep it as secure as I can. It's like a part time job that I hate... If I used this thing for gaming only I'd be perfectly happy setting everything to auto-update and forgetting it.
I've gone from pitying people who pop their Macbook open and proclaim, "Steve Jobs knows what's best for me!" to envying them. My brain, it's tired... 
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Re: Want to dip my toes into Macintosh waters, but ghetto. How old is too old?
[Re: italie]
#258969 - 07/04/11 05:16 AM
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> It'll teach you what a .kext is at least....
I can write and compile a Hello World .kext before yo mama has breakfast in the morning. .kext .schmext If you installed all my Hello World .kext your Hackintosh would be saying hello to every known exoplanet before it booted. You'd have to scroll your system log for days to find the message about mounting the root file system.
 
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| italie |
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MAME owes italie many thank yous, hah
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Re: Want to dip my toes into Macintosh waters, but ghetto. How old is too old?
[Re: Matty_]
#258971 - 07/04/11 05:56 AM
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> > It'll teach you what a .kext is at least....
>
> I can write and compile a Hello World .kext before yo mama has breakfast in the
> morning. .kext .schmext If you installed all my Hello World .kext your Hackintosh
> would be saying hello to every known exoplanet before it booted. You'd have to scroll
> your system log for days to find the message about mounting the root file system.
You are so computer illiterate, you shake your laptop to get the cookies out  
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| Sune |
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Connected
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Reged: 09/21/03
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Re: How old is too old?
[Re: aavada]
#259026 - 07/05/11 01:13 AM
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> From what I've read if I get something with Tiger on it I'll learn enough of the
> basics of Appledom to jump right into Lion when it comes out.
Too old is something with a PowerPC CPU. Get something like an iMac with a Core 2 Duo. There are many, many models though. You can look and compare specs here:
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/index-imac.html
Annoying fact: Anything with a Geforce 7 series video card will not play Valve Source Engine games because of a missing OpenGL extension in the NV40 series nvidia drivers.
Some Macs that have 64-bit CPUs + 32-bit EFI firmware can only run Snow Leopard in 32-bit kernel and drivers mode. You can still run 64-bit apps on it but there are some limitations. It's a bit confusing how this works exactly, OS X is kind of a hybrid 32/64-bit OS.
I am not sure how this works in Lion, Apple likes to invent ways to cut off support for older hardware. So your used iMac, or whatever you get, might not be able to run Lion.
If it's just to learn OS X, instead of buying a used Mac you might want to consider running OS X in a virtual machine on Windows. It's not officially supported but there are ways.
S
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> Too old is something with a PowerPC CPU.
Remind me to hide the debit card the next time I drink at a BBQ. Got all "spendy" earlier today and ordered one of these. (Before I read your advice, d'oh!) Figured I could at least give it to my best friend's kid when he's old enough.
Oh well, looking forward to seeing how much I can wring out of it.
[ATTACHED IMAGE - CLICK FOR FULL SIZE]
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| Sune |
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Connected
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Re: Well, that's done.
[Re: aavada]
#259083 - 07/05/11 06:10 PM
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> > Too old is something with a PowerPC CPU.
>
> Remind me to hide the debit card the next time I drink at a BBQ. Got all "spendy"
> earlier today and ordered one of these. (Before I read your advice, d'oh!) Figured I
> could at least give it to my best friend's kid when he's old enough.
lol, I have two of those. My brother in law is slowly destroying the working one.
> Oh well, looking forward to seeing how much I can wring out of it.
Good:
It's virtually indestructible (google for funny stories, one survived being run over by a truck, one survived being left outside in the snow for days etc etc.
It can run OS9 aka "classic" alongside Tiger, which means you can play old 68K/Powermac games on it.
It's a great tool for manipulating/preparing disk images for use with Mac emulation in MESS.
It's a cutie. lol
Bad:
Adobe Flash runs like crap or not at all, PPC support is going...Patched versions of Flash are available but..meh.
No official PPC version of Firefox since 3.6.18. But there's this:
http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/
Not enough RAM! Buy this:
http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Technology...d=10AUIJV26CAY7
Take care when using the the power brick, the cord and mac-side plug break easily. If you'd like to buy an extra PSU for it try to find one with a higher wattage than the stock one.
For maximum fun don't install Leopard on it, keep it on Tiger 10.4.11 so that you can run Classic. Unless you don't care about retro stuff the ability to run OS9 is definitely one of its best features.
MacOS Installation tip:
If you have access to another Mac with firewire port you can use Firewire Target Disk Mode: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661 and Apple Disk Utility to partition the hard drive on the MacBook.
Create two partitions, one for the main install and a ~5 GB partition at the end of the drive. Use Disk Utility's "restore" function to clone your Mac OS install DVD to that partition. This partition will be bootable just like the DVD, it's much faster to install from hard drive, and this way you always have a 'recovery environment' you can boot into if something goes wrong with your main installation. You can do a disk repair, work from the command line etc etc.
If you don't have access to another Mac, I *think* you might be able to do the same thing when booting from the install DVD itself. I haven't tried it.
S
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so much info... too stupid tired to process at the moment, but thanks! _nt_
[Re: Sune]
#259160 - 07/06/11 06:52 AM
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Run common use applications under Windows, install any unnecessary crap on virtual machines
[Re: aavada]
#259192 - 07/06/11 05:05 PM
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Simple, cheap, no dangerous and no need to learn a whole new OS. It doesn't get any easier.
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