Switch to Mac

So, I finally got around to switching my main desktop machine to the Mac (original post. It did not go as smoothly as the other 3 machines mentioned in the original post, but is now up and running.

The first and main problem manifested itself during the first boot after the initial install. The install CD booted correctly and the install went smoothly. But, after it was complete and the system rebooted itself, it would hang after the bootloader with several lines of text starting with OPENPIC. After some googling, I found that it was a known bug. I was able to boot by telling the machine that it only had 768M of RAM, when in fact it had 1.5 gigs of RAM. After some messing around with the RAM, I discovered that it would work fine if I only had 1 gig of RAM installed. So, I just went with that. It kind of sucks that I'm limited to 1 gig, but my previous machine only had 512 megs, so I'm ok with it. This problem took me a couple weeks to figure out (well, a couple weeks of occasionally thinking about it and messing with it, then getting frustrated and going back to my functioning machine).

After doing a little reading up on the Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM) for this post, I've basically decided that I'll use it every time I install a new Linux box. It may very well be that most of the time, I won't really need it or have cause to take advantage of it's features, but it doesn't hurt to have it there and when I do need it it'll be there. The Mac has a 20 gig drive in it, which I was going to use as the system drive. So, during the install, I partitioned the drive so that it had a 60 meg /boot partition, a 1 gig / partition (I have read that you want to keep your / and /boot directories on non-LVM partitions), an 800 meg swap partition, and the remainder was partitioned for use as an LVM physical volume (PV). So, I setup LVM to have one volume group (VG) that contained that PV. Within that VG, I setup the various directories (mount points really, but I figure if you care, you probably already know that) as logical volumes (LVs). The LVs I setup were for /usr /var /tmp /var/log, etc. I like to have them all split up so that I can assign different options to them (I'm pretty liberal with setting mount points to be noexec--files can be executed here--for example). I also setup a LV for /home.

Part of the install of the Mac was going to entail moving a 160 gig drive from my old machine to the new one. I wanted that drive to be added to the existing /home directory/LV, but first it had to be backed up and reformatted for various reasons. This was a perfect chance to make use of some of the LVM goodness I'd been reading about. So, the way it worked follows.

I backed up the stuff I wanted to keep off of the 160 gig drive to another drive and then shut down the machine. I yanked both drives from the PC, hooked them up to the Mac and booted it up. Once booted, I started up cfdisk to partition the 160 gig drive into another 800 meg swap partition and the remainder as one partition to be used by LVM. The actual LVM commands were incredibly simple. There's probably a nice graphical way to do it, but I'm a command-line guy, so here's the commands I ran:

First, define the new partition (/dev/hdb2) as a physical volume:

$ pvcreate /dev/hdb2

Next, add the new PV to the existing volume group (named vg0):

$ vgextend vg0 /dev/hdb2

Extend the logical volume (name lvHome) to use the newly available space. You have to tell it how much new space to use, so I used all that was available, which was about 158 gigs:

$ lvextend lvHome 158G

The only thing left to do was to grow the /home filesystem. I'm using XFS for my file system. One of the reasons I'm using XFS is that I've read that it is easy to change it's size. To grow /home, I ran this:

$ xfs_growfs /home

With no other options, xfs_growfs will just grow the filesystem to the largest available size. So now, df (command to show filesystem disk usage, shows this (this is after I'd copied all the backed up data to /home):

$ df -h /home

Filesystem             Size    Used  Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/mapper/vg0-lvHome   160G   65G   95G  41%   /home

Other than those two things, the install went very smoothly. My cable internet connection was unusually fast that night, so the downloading and installing of software went very quickly. After that, I simply copied Cyndi and my config files over into our home directories and when I logged in, everything was just as it had been on the old machine (oh, the beauty of text-file based configuration!). The only difference was that now it was in an ugly Mac G4 box, and the alt key is in the wrong place. I'm thinking of mapping the dumb apple/command key to alt, so we don't have to remember that it's different.

Actually, there are a few other differences, but nothing major. Mostly, the differences are related to the different keyboard (F15 instead of Pause/Break, for example). Also, Macromedia/Adobe has never released a Linux PowerPC version of their Flash player. I'm fine with this, as I usually don't install Flash because it annoys me so, but Cyndi likes to have it. So, through the wonder of SSH X-forwarding, what I will do (haven't yet), is setup a menu item for her that will run a web browser on the kids machine (Linux PC, for which there is a Flash player plugin) and display it on her desktop. In this way, she'll be able to view sites with Flash. Oh, how I loathe Flash.

In working inside the Mac, I've reaffirmed that I do prefer the more standardized layout of PC hardware. The Mac is really intended to be bought, used, and discarded when you buy the next one--basically, a black box. It's not really intended to be upgraded. Even something as simple as adding another hard drive is more difficult than it typically is on a PC.

All in all, it was a pretty easy process, with the exceptions noted above, of course. Hopefully, now this means that I'll be able to start actually working on the MythTV box...