Mac-mini adventures

I spent a few hours this weekend setting up a new mac-Mini in the bedroom. In general, the whole experience was pretty smooth, and I have considerably more faith that this computer will not become a maintainence nightmare, like the house's last remaining Windows box. The mini scores a few points on linux, for plugging in camera's and setting up sound etc. (but I expect it looses sorely in ability to compile stuff, given the literny of problems I've seen on mailing lists over the last year.)

One thing that did not impress me was Quicktime, while it cutely played movie trailers, It had quite a few problems with avi files.

a) came up with a message about unreadable format, and redirected me to a page listing 3rd party add-ons (without specifying which one I might need)
b) refused to go fullscreen..

Given the overal quality of the rest of OSX, these where rather disappointing. A quick SMS to a friend indicated that VLC was a better bet for AVI's... - he did suggest MS's media player, but keeping anything from MS, as far away as possible from this box, is the general plan..

A few other things installed very easily

• NeoOffice/J (Open office for osx)
• Firefox - Safari is cute, but not quite as polished as firefox.

The other bit that confused me totally was that it had no root account by default, you have to go through various steps to enable it..  - so now we have apt-get working, although what looks like a rather limited choice of applications..

Now to get ssh working so I can do compile tests with some of the php libraries..