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December 28, 2005

Second day with OSX on my P4

I have spent most of this morning using OSX and trying to 'understand' it. So far, I have determined that Skype just isn't going to work and I am guessing it is because I am using the OSX Intel Developer release. I have had successes though. I installed MSN Messenger and Windows Media Player fine, but it is funny that I am using Apple's OS but some of the first programs I need to install are Windows applications.

Messenger has a really nice GUI, even better than the Windows Messenger Live BETA I am running on XP. And Windows Media Player for Mac played my OSX video perfectly, another it did crash once as I tried to resize the window. While making that video I had terrible trouble getting a good quality image with a small file size when I tried to export it to DIVX or Quicktime so that was my reason to export it in WMV but I am happy that Mac users could view it, but I am not sure if Linux users can. (Video exporting and a common file format is a topic for another day.)




Proof of my install


I got the Firefox install sorted out.


Windows Media Player and MSN Messenger


One big failure I had with OSX was trying to install OpenOffice. The installer would run and seemed to almost complete but it would just get stuck on installing a script file, so I had to cancel the installation. I managed to work out the keyboard combination (thanks Google) so that I could capture screen shots and took a few, however, I could not work out how to resize the images in iPhoto, so I will have to resize them and post the screenshots when I am back on Windows.



Looked like the install would work, but stalled soon after.


Trying out Nvu which I heard about from StepOnePro.com another IPTV show.

My final thought of today is could/would I move to OSX permanently or at least make it my second OS. At the moment Fedora Core is my second OS as I have a spare AMD based PC to use it on, if I want to use OSX I have to remove the XP hard drive from my P4 and insert the Mac one. The PC is a slim line desktop PC so has no space for both drives. One possible possibility is that I install OSX under VirtualPC, but I fear it would become too sluggish to be useable. My one big tie to stick with Windows is Outlook but if I could setup Exchange correctly I could have my Outlook via Outlook Web Access and then I could be completely platform independent. So would I make the switch?? If I had the money for a dedicated OSX PC or a genuine Apple PC then I would probably switch, but for now I think my time is better spent learning Fedora Core as I already have a separate PC for that.

(This post was initially posted using OSX and Safari, but images resized, posted and article spell checked on XP)

Posted by The Technician at December 28, 2005 02:16 PM

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