Hard Hardware

All right, I'm getting used to OS X. I have two big challenges to go:

1. Get my printer to work (a Lexmark E210)
   
2. Get my scanner to work (a Mustek 1200 UB Plus)
   

Why this is a challenge? Because even under Windows XP the driver situation is not really terrific. Windows XP does not recognize my printer and scanner. For the printer the solution is easy: use the install CD that came with the printer to install the driver and you're done. What happens when a new Windows version comes out, I don't know. Probably my printer is useless under Windows by then. The scanner is a harder beast. It takes downloading and installing two huge driver sets from Mustek. And even then the scanner is not really reliable.

Under Linux you would expect an even worse situation. Wrong. Linux distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu and such automatically recognize my printer. The scanner is slightly harder: it takes downloading one firmware file and changing a setting in a config file. Done.

So now OS X. Luckily it resembles the Linux situation a little.

Lexmark E210
I downloaded the right drivers from the LinuxPrinting people. You can find it here. You need both packages, install the espgs package first. It's still PowerPC architecture, but it works. Add the printer, done.

Mustek 1200 UB Plus
Download the following from here:
TWAIN SANE Interface, SANE Preference Page, SANE Backends, libusb and install them in reverse order. Download the firmware file and make the same (!) change in the config file to override the scanner type. Done. Scanning works. There is on challenge left: the Apple Image Capture tool is a little hard-headed. It needs it's own configuration file describing my scanner. I leave that as an excercise to the reader. The command-line 'scanimage' command works. I'm ready for now.

Well, that was not too hard. I like this UNIX like OS!

123Macmini.com

There is a site dedicated to the Mac mini: 123Macmini. Articles, forums, galleries and more. Check it out!
The picture from my previous posts should be in the 'User Setup' gallery.

My Setup

Here a picture of my setup...

Discovering Dashboard Widgets

There are a lot of useful Widgets out there. A small selection of the ones I liked:

• Amazon Album Art: automatically search for album art on amazon for the song playing in iTunes and add it to the track (or album). There are several tools like these available on the Apple website.
• JavaDoc: Quickly access the local Java documentation.
• Screenshot Plus: Take screenshots of specific screen, widgets and all other useful variants. You can select the format and the way it is saved (desktop or specify).
  

(this entry is work in progress)

Create a DVD from XviD movies

Previously I wrote about playing XviD movies in QuickTime & FrontRow. Well, that wasn't too hard, so I decided to make life a little harder on myself. I want to put some of these movies on a DVD. A real DVD, not a data DVD.

So I have to convert the XviD + MP3 stream into a MPEG-2 + AC-3 stream. I think. After some serious browsing I discovered a tool that seemed perfect for the job: ffmpegX.

You have to download some extra tools to get it working (which is documented nicely). However, the tool is still only available for the PowerPC architecture, so it's being emulated with Rosetta. And therefore, slow as a dog... No way I'm going to wait several hours for recoding a one hour Xvid movie.

Tooltime

This evening I downloaded the tools mentioned in the previous post.

Desktop Manager
Great virtual desktop manager. Nice effects for changing the current virtual desktop. Two 'problems' however:

1. When changing the desktop Desktop Manager can display the name of the selected desktop. Works only for the first desktop. Strange.
   
2. I'm used to having different backgrounds per virtual desktop. No such feature in Desktop Manager

But hey, it's Open Source. I can change it, if I have the time...

Witch
I absolutely like Witch. I mapped Alt-Tab and Shift-Alt-Tab to the Witch window switcher. Great. It shows all the available windows. Also mapped the Apple-key+Z to 'Zoom Window'. I was missing that from the default key bindings.

Butler
Butler was a little strange for me. Don't exactly know what problem/need it tries to solve. It looks very very feature-rich but that comes at a price: Clarity. I did like the fact that it can create extra menus in the Apple Menu in my screen. Maybe I'll use it some day.

ServiceScrubber
I did use ServiceScrubber to remove a 'to chinese converter' from that strange Service menu. I'm not really used to the service menu, so I cannot really judge the value of this tool.

Well, that's it for today. Played my table-tennis competition this evening, so no playing around with Mac mini's. Just this blog entry.

Nice tools

Found some nice tools at Peter Maurers site

These tools include (amongst others):

• Butler: Lets you create various kinds of menus and triggers. See the site for more information, it seems it can do a lot.
• Service Scrubber: Wouldn't the services menu be much more useful if it weren't overcrowded by services you never even thought of using? With Service Scrubber, you can
• Witch: Have you ever wanted to switch to a certain window — not just the application it belongs to? While you can use Exposé to switch windows, doing so can be very clumsy if you're the keyboard-only type of user. And don't all of these windows look just the same when they are scaled down?
• FileList: File List is a batch file renamer, and a playlist generator.

(Texts in italic are from Peter Maurers site)

Also found a nice tool for people like me who miss Unix-style Virtual Desktops. It's called Desktop Manager and the screenshots and movies look nice...

Didn't try them yet...

By the way, I swapped my VGA cable for a good quality one. My shadow problems are mostly gone. Should really order that DVI<->HDMI cable soon. But the current connection is good enough for now.

Look, no wires!

Another expensive day. I bought an Apple Wireless Keyboard and an Apple Wireless Mouse. Although I have some problems getting used to a 1-buton mouse, I like the keyboard and mouse. The distance from the TV in our living room (max 4 meters, 12 feet) is absolutely no problem. The keyboard is heavy enough not to feel cheap and the keys feel OK.

But not everything is 100% perfect...
There is a setting in the Bluetooth settings to enable waking up the mini from a Bluetooth device. Well, the little light on the front of the mini goes on, but that's all. No display...

So I turned off this setting.

Gimp & X11: Install disc revisited

X11 is there!

It just takes a better look. When you insert the install DVD a window like the one on the left shows. Well, maybe you noticed it, but I didn't the first time: it has a scroll bar! Scrolling down you get the one on the right:

Now start Optional Installs and select X11. By the way, in my factory install, X11 is the only thing that is not pre-installed :-(

X11 installed, Gimp is running! For links to Gimp see the menu on the left.

Some surprises on the Install discs

I'm used to Gimp for editing pictures. So I downloaded a copy of Gimp for Mac OS X and ... it missed Apple's X11. In the hope I could find X11 on the discs I got with the mini I popped the "Mac mini Mac OS X Install Disc1" in the drive. Well, X11 is not there (later on it turns out that X11 is there, see next post), but to my surprise there are two additional applications available on the disc that are not pre-installed from the factory:

• Quicken 2006 (full version, no restrictions it seems)
• Microsoft Office 2004 (30 day trial version) (available in a few different languages)

These applications can be installed using the "Install Bundled Software Only" option in the menu that comes up after inserting the Install Disc. In the screen "Installation Type" I hit the "Customize" button and deselected everything but the Quicken and Office. This prevented the Installer from upgrading everything that was already installed. The installation went flawless...

However, both applications are not Universal. In the case of Quicken I didn't even notice that it was being emulated by Rosetta, but Office was notably slow. The system comes pre-installed with a trial-version of iWork '06. Keynote is a Universal application and is notably faster than PowerPoint.

Next challenge: get XviD movies running in QuickTime & FrontRow

Step 1: Go to: http://n.ethz.ch/student/naegelic/ for information.
Step 2: Download: XviD_Avi_Import_Preview3_intel.dmg
Step 3: Follow the instructions:
To install this Component, just drag the Files "XviD_Codec-r55.component" and "AviImporter-r3.component" into Library/QuickTime. The Library directory can be found either at your Home directory (to install it just for the actual user) or at top-level of your startup volume (this needs an administrator account).
Step 4: Watch your movie in QuickTime or FrontRow...

TV & Surround sound

This evening I hooked up my mini to my Samsung TFT TV for the first time. The mini was switched off at a 1400*1050 resolution. It automatically adapted to the maximum resolution of the TV which is 1360*768. There is a lot of ghosting in the image. Big letters have shadows to their right side. Currently the mini is hooked up to the Samsung TV with a bad quality VGA cable. I will by a DVI to HDMI cable and hope the display gets better.

Spend a lot of frustrating time getting surround sound to work. The mini is optically connected to my surround receiver (NAD). There is no problem playing Dolby Digital or DTS sound, but AAC content is a problem. According to quicktime the AAC content has 6 channels but they arrive at the surround receiver in 2 channel stereo format. I read somewhere that this is normal, since the format used in AAC is not a format recognized by normal surround receivers. In this case the computer should create the six channel audio and send it to a surround receiver in six seperate audio channels. But the mini only has a two channel analog output. Adding a seperate (USB) soundcard with six seperate audio outputs to the mini seems to be the solution. Well, doesn't seem so important anymore. If my DVD's play with surround I'm happy.

It's just the HD movie trailers on the Apple site use AAC encoding so they will not play in surround format.

First experiences with my new toy

All right, it's small. Smaller than I expected.
In the box:

• The mini
• The remote control
• A box containing manuals and CD's
• A DVI to VGA adapter
• Power supply

The first boot looks a little slow. Nice movie welcoming me to my new machine...
Then answer some questions. The registration fails because I'm behind a proxy-server here.

And then ... MacOS/X in it's full glory.

What I liked:

• Exposé, I configured it to respond to the left bottom en right bottom corners
• Front Row is very easy to navigate using the remote
• The package
• The fact that when I got lost in the UI for configuring date & time that I could simply start a command shell and use familiar Unix commands...
• Display configuration just works...

What I didn't like

• At first the machine wouldn't wake up from sleep. Had to shut it down and restart. I reconfigured the automatic sleep functionality and after that it suddenly worked. Don't know what happened, but I moved both system and display sleep to 'never'. Now it works. Reconfigured the mentioned settings to 3 minuts display sleep and 15 minutes system sleep. Works. Strange.
• ?
  

So I bought one...

Went to the store yesterday evening. They only have standard models (with 512 MB Ram) in stock. They can do the upgrade to 1GB in their store, but then you're left with two (almost) useless 256MB modules. So I went home...

This morning, I decided to simply purchase the basic Core Duo model and upgrade later. Currently the upgrade costs about 100 Euro's from the Apple Store. Buying 1GB of upgrade memory from Kingston seperately costs about 160 Euros. I hope the prices of this kind of memory fall rapidly. I'll upgrade then.

So I bought one! Took the box to work and unpacked it there. Lot's of curious (maybe a little jealous?) colleagues followed my first steps in to the real Mac world. Not counting some experience with OS/X on a Dell Latitude laptop. Not mine of course. No sir!

The plan is...

To buy my first Mac: A Mac mini.
and
To document my experiences on this blog.
and
Gather some useful links to info and applications for the mini.

Let's see how it works out...