My desktop today:



I made the background myself earlier. I have several whacky ones like that if anyone wants them

Looks like a visualization from media player

You have 3 MSN Icons in your systray

Nope, its from WinAmp in fullscreen high definition mode.

I have 2 MSN's and 1 Windows messenger icon

My current desktop

@andy : mkay

@sonic : look sweet - i love the vista drive watch - I only have a Mod that will look like a little bit like yours

Here is my April Desktop.

I made my own theme. Its over on Aeroxp if you want a better look or a download of it.

. . . of what ?

The desktop in my pic is my own theme called Aero Maxclear. Its an all glass version of aero

I was talking about the Drive Watch, so I was confused as he write " I make my own themes "

Notice anything different about my desktop this month?

Looks a bit similar to mines!

My April Desk.

Admin Edit: Use the BA image uploader for all images.

Thx for deleted my Pics. why can I not use Imageshack. I don't know how the Beta Archive works and it use the same Hosting Place i think.

doggy

Moderator Edit: ImageShack is slow and unreliable. Use the BA image uploader, it's usage is very easy. You see the link whenever you make a new post. The BA image uploader does not use the same "hosting place" as ImageShack.

Is that AveDesk on the right or is this the real integrated mac OSX feature

Yup This Mac's awesome; it's the Beige G3 I got for free (came with 640 MB memory inside ) and it runs Tiger so fast and smooth! Took me a few days to get Tiger installed as I had to use XPostFacto, but it was worth it You'd never get Vista running so nicely on something so old...

What do you mean by "on the right"? The icons? This is how volumes and disks are shown in Mac OS X


Yes, that's right. More than that, every new OS X release so far has even been a bit faster than the previous one, also on older machines. Something you've never had with MS' stuff. Yeah, XPostFacto can be a bit tricky to get used to, but I also think it's worth it as long as you have enough RAM Now go get your hands dirty in some Unix CLI stuff, I am currently running Linux as the only OS on my Intel Mac (but I admit that if I didn't have another Mac running OS X, I'd miss it.)

Yes, one reason I was keen to get this Mac (my first X-capable Mac) was to start investigating Unix - I've never used a Unix-based OS before and find the idea of Linux etc a bit terrifying, so I reckon OS X will be a really good way of starting to understand another system, and I'd like to get into all the Terminal stuff as it seems a very powerful interface once you're used to it and is quite different to what I'm used to (Windows). Always good to see something new, and I'm not scared of OS X like I am a bit of the other Unix OSes Although looking back it would probably actually have been more straightforward to install Linux (or at least one of the supposedly "easy" versions of it) on a PC than Tiger on this Mac - first it just booted into the Installer and gave the "your computer is not compatible with 10.4", XPostFacto only successfully tricking the Installer after I removed the non-stock PCI cards I'd added earlier, and then it struggled to boot into the second stage of the installation (I had to remove some of the hard drives, go back to OS 9 and delete a kext that it had made on the OS X drive, clear the parameter ram and reset the Cuda chip several times, as it kept hanging, booting only OS 9, or kernel-panicking), but it hasn't crashed once since the installation completed. Interestingly, it only takes 70 seconds from pressing the power button to the desktop having completely loaded - not only is that surprisingly fast for such an advanced OS on such an old computer, but it's actually about the same as my 2.5 year old PC takes to boot XP (the installation is also 2.5 years old now and could do with refreshing though; it used to take only about 35-40 seconds from power-on to a fully-loaded desktop).

Yeah, Unix is exciting. And I agree that OS X is, errrm, *sweats*, yeah, kinda the sexiest Unix-like OS out there (I mean the GUI). Yes, the Terminal/CLI is powerful.

Why are you scared of Linux? (Or no, don't need to answer that.) The easier destributions are almost as easy to install as XP or Vista...

If your Linux experience begins with that, it's a piece of cake compared to my 1st contact with it back in 1998/99. Back then, I was installing SuSE 5.3 (a gift from a friend) on my testing box which was a 486 with 24MB of RAM and a 250MB HD. To make it short, I could only install a minimal text-based system because the HD was too small for a complete X11 setup and thus I had to install the necessary packages for a minimal GUI manually, manually resolving and struggling with all the dependencies, but after endless hours in front of that flickering 15" monitor in the cold unheated cellar, I had the GUI up (after I managed to configure the X11 server). When this was running, I a) felt like a king and b) was infected and soon installed Linux on my main PC. From there, the story went on, I continued using it, tried other distributions and other Unix-like OSes like BSD, Solaris, etc.

And, something I will never forget: By this time, I, an 11-year old boring boy, was the only one running Linux in my school. None of my classmates even knew about it, not even these that were a bit computer-savvy (heck, when I told them I was running Windows NT, they said "What the hell is that?"). That was a truly great feeling. Yeah, I know, I am probably a geek.

As for Tiger on "unsupported machines", yes, sometimes XPF requires you to do some awkward things like these you mentioned, but it's all worth it once you get the OS up and running and it's stable. What's the HD size in your G3? Judging from the screenshot, I'd say ~40GB in total but I'd like to ask anyway.

PS: I can see this going off-topic, so it may be a good idea to continue our discussion via PM.

I never had a computer at home until I was 12 I wish I had though, as it seems if you get into it younger you get into programming and Unix and stuff like that, which I never have as I started when I was way too old! All the people I know who can program etc. started using computers really really young. It would have been great if we could have afforded a computer like this Mac when we got our first machine at home in 1998 (the same year as this Mac was new) – this system retailed for $5,000 new ($3,000 for the tower and $2,000 for the LCD screen – many many times what our first PC back then cost!), and that’s before adding all the memory that it came with (I think Beige G3s only came with 32 MB as standard!)

Your first experience with Linux was a bit like mine with OS X (at least my first on a real Mac, though PearPC/OSx86 can be a bit of a struggle too) - for the 5 or so days I wrestled with it I quite often thought it was never going to work ever, as apparently not all Beige G3s are the same and some never work with OS X for unknown reasons, or even die when you try to load X onto them, and I was so happy when it finally finished, and started to play that oh-so-cool intro movie/music!




The drives I have are a 12 GB partitioned with the first 8 GB for Tiger (as the Beige G3 can only boot OS X from a <8 GB partition, and it must be the first partition on the first drive on the first IDE bus) and the other 4 GB for OS 9.2.2, an 8 GB drive, a 20 GB drive, and a Sony DVD-RW (non-Apple logoed but happily boots the machine from a CD/DVD, a lot of non-Apple drives not bootable in a Mac but certain brands eg Sony usually working). If you're wondering why I use a load of tiny drives instead of one big one, it's because that's all I could scavenge (the 8 and 12 GB ones were free, and the 20 GB one cost £3) I did see that you can get a good quality 80 GB drive brand new for about £26 nowadays and was half-tempted, but in the end decided it's not really worth spending that kind of cash on a free computer.

A further problem I hit when installing X that I forgot to mention before was that I went back to the stock CD-ROM drive when installing as apparently XPostFacto works best with the machine as close to standard as possible, but it had trouble reading my second Tiger CD so I had to switch back to the DVD-RW drive, which seemed happier with burned discs. A lot of swapping bits of hardware in and out, and searching around on the web for ages for solutions to the kernel panics etc that I got while trying to install it!




Sorry I'll stop now!

It's going offtopic, so I'll keep it short.


From my experience, if you want to use Mac OS X as an introduction to UNIX, don't. It's the most off-the-standard UNIX I have ever seen. For example, I had to wrestle with NetInfo (on plain Darwin, without all the fancy GUI) for hours (I'm exaggerating, but you get my point) just to make it use a proper DNS server. On any other UNIX I'd simply edit the /etc/resolv.conf file, but no, if I only have Darwin (and not the full Mac OS X), I have to write a 50+ line C++ program (exaggerating again ) just to automate the process of setting a new DNS server. On Linux, I'd write a shell script containing:

And don't get me started on its poor (to say the least) X11 support.

Darwin/OSX's being off the standard is one of the reasons I switched OSBA OS to being based on Linux.

Don't get me wrong. Mac OS X is a great platform IMO, but as a UNIX, it's only good if you're interested in the applications, and less in the OS itself.

Okay, its better then on Windows, how many other things

It's more convenient, IMHO, to have the drives/volumes right on the desktop. (If they're mountable, that is).

My mac:

Im really pleased with my mac, its a iMac 'Strawberry'. I rescued it because it was going to get thrown out if noone took it.

My PC:


Also rescued

my dell laptop running 2000