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Looking for advice, tips, wisdom: Adding my 1st Mac into the [tech] family...
Stoic Joker:
Am I the only one who hates gestures and was happy with the simple "scroll areas" on the sides of touch pads, along with a right and *physical* button?-JavaJones (June 13, 2011, 03:32 PM)
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Nope, I am totally with you on that! :) Only gestures I like are done in the air in front of the screen ... Or in traffic...
wreckedcarzz:
After a long, very VERY annoying and anger-inducing supposedly 5 minute trip to go locate a Dual-Layer DVD (and coming home 3 hours later with an 8GB ADATA flash drive), I have upgraded the iBook to Leopard. Snow Leopard (and Lion, for that matter) is Intel-only, so this is the "end of the road" for Apple upgrades and non-security updates for it. I'm debating throwing another GB of RAM into it (to max it out at 1.5GB), as it is usable and not much slower than it was with Tiger (it is not really "slow" but I'm used to my 6 core Win7 box with an SSD in it :P). I'm learning a bit here and there on what does what and what breaks this functionality (gonna keep that USB stick in a very safe place!) so I'll have to decide that over the coming weeks.
I've customized things and tweaked items here and there; the logon screen shows information about me, my phone number, and that the computer is "NOT FOR SALE" in case I walk away from it in a not-so-trustworthy location and it happens to walk off and land on Craigslist or a pawn shop or the like. Prey is also is installed to assist with that (gotta love Prey :-*). Found out that Truecrypt can't encrypt the OSX boot drive (like it can for Windows), and that FileVault (OSX's Home folder encryption system) is buggy and not as secure as one may be lead to believe. I'm also diving into the Open Firmware (what, if I am understanding correctly, is Apple's version of the BIOS, basically) and seeing what I can do in that as far as locking it down right now. Maintenance and security are what I want to learn about first and foremost :)
I took it to the Apple Store at the nearby mall, and the guy I talked to chuckled and said "I can't do even basic diagnostics on this for you, it's too old. I can't even order parts if something breaks or goes bad. [...] If it is a software issue, bring it on in and we can help you with that, but as far as hardware goes, you're on your own." I assume all their software tools for testing hardware are Intel-only now. He was nice enough to point me to MacMedia (one of which was just built about a mile south of the mall) whom can "probably still help" me with hardware issues. So far, no problems (battery life is amazing as well).
Overall, I'm not regretting this at all (yet). It's a bit depressing to look at my bank account and know that I could have almost double what it is right now if I hadn't done all this, but I'd still call it "worth it." :Thmbsup:
EDIT: You aren't supposed to be able to boot PPC-based Macs from USB, but I didn't want to pay $12.50 + tax for 10 DVD-DL disks that I would use one of and then the rest would sit, hence the USB drive. The Leopard disk image was ripped from a friend's old Leopard DVD (who upgraded to Snow Leopard a few months back and gives me all his old tech stuff). I couldn't find the disk last night so I had to go through this huge convoluted process to get an ISO onto the iBook and turn it into a DMG and the DMG into a compressed DMG, then load it onto the ADATA stick, then get it to boot... :'(
Carol Haynes:
Ah there is nothing like the 'just use it' nature of the Mac.
Glad you are having fun - but try posting some of this onto a Mac forum and I bet you will get some strange comments :-*
jgpaiva:
Found out that Truecrypt can't encrypt the OSX boot drive (like it can for Windows), and that FileVault (OSX's Home folder encryption system) is buggy and not as secure as one may be lead to believe.
-wreckedcarzz (June 18, 2011, 09:04 PM)
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You do *not* want to activate FileVault :)
Here goes my experience:
I activated it on the laptop when I started configuring it, so I had no problems there.
However, when the disk gets full, FileVault is a PITA! It never frees space (actually, it does, but I was never able to understand the logic behind it), so, if you fill up the drive, you can't just delete some stuff because the free space won't be updated right away, only when you reboot the machine (sometimes logoff also works). This is particularly interesting when combined with Apple's 300MB of updates needing 6GB of free disk to install, which will only be released when you reboot the machine (because of filevault).
But the very worst feature about it, is that it uses some constant 12-20% of the processor, which causes the laptop to overhead (even more easily than it usually does).
Also, when you want to disable it, you'll have to have free space > used space, as it first decrypts and copies the whole data and then deletes the old data. I ended up just using an external disk and deleting the data on the whole disk. (which is probably also the fastest method anyway)
wreckedcarzz:
Ah there is nothing like the 'just use it' nature of the Mac.
Glad you are having fun - but try posting some of this onto a Mac forum and I bet you will get some strange comments :-*
-Carol Haynes (June 19, 2011, 07:46 AM)
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Indeed, although I don't think "strange" would be quite the word to use there :P
You do *not* want to activate FileVault :)
Here goes my experience
-jgpaiva (June 19, 2011, 08:24 AM)
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Oh lord, ugh. I knew it did a copy-then-delete process, but jeez :'( .... wouldn't that problem be circumventable by FV just deleting the un/encrypted files as it de/encrypts them, instead of doing it all in one go? You would think it would check the amount of free space and give you an option. ::)
Regardless, I need to remember to never mess with that again, seeing as the drive is only 60GB (and I'm using about 30 of that right now).
Oh, and strangely enough, upgrading to Leopard dramatically increased flash-video frames per second (with no changes to Flash, still on the latest version of 9). It gets choppy now and again with some videos (I'm only using YouTube for this thus far) but it is for very short bursts and, for the most part, is no longer a horrible torturous pain to watch. Not sure if that has to do with hardware acceleration (I believe I read somewhere about Leopard taking advantage of the GPU to do 2D processing, kind of like Vista started, but I could be wrong). :huh:
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