Somewhere out there!

Was at my brothers today showing him some prints from our new colour laser printer. (More about that in a later post). His wife has a G4 running OSX, we were trying to figure out how to connect to the two machines. The last time we tried was when the machine was running OS 9. Obviously it did not work, a wasted effort. However, OSX now has the wonders of Samba and BSD to draw on. Connecting to a file share on the WinXP boxs, was simple as saying cheese. Very slick I must admit.

Our second problem was trying to get it to connect to a print share. The Epson C70 inkjet they have is not strong as our old C800, after 18 odd months of moderate use the USB plug has broken off. No good for the Mac! Anyway its not an easy process, certain not some thing Apple talk about in their help file. So its Google to the rescue, moments later and a sure fire method is discovered: How to Use a Printer Attached to a Windows XP Computer in Mac OS X.

I’m quite glad this happen today, reminded me that I have a machine that is accessible so I can do some experiments to see if OSX is good enough for me to want to change from x86/KDE. Especially Liquid Ledgers. I like the look of the unlimited undoes. Seems like a simple but complete package that will be perfect for my mother to look after her finances. I’m interested in see how much better than Gnucash (for myself) or Money (for my family) it is.

I need to move back to working on laptops as I’ll be doing a bit of travel. Been thinking about switching to a Powerbook, this seems like a good place to start: The Tao of Mac – HOWTO/Switch To The Mac.

Lack of an OSX Openoffice port, it probably the main thing that is holding me back. We use OO in our business, so it would be a pain to be without it. Especially the upcoming 2.0 release. I could of course run Debian/PPC, but that somewhat defeats the purpose. Then there is the NX option from my colo box. I’m not sure if there is a native NX client for OSX. Something to explore.

Finally a test the water Mac Mini, at the right price point.