It’s been an interesting week with my gadgets. I’ve had this computer lying around that I thought I would turn into a back up server. Mostly just playing around with things in the early morning hours and needing to do an onsite back up anyhow. after playing around with various tiny distributions like Puppy and DSLinux, I thought better of what I was doing and with which components. Well actually I remembered that I had 5 external drives in a box still packed up from the move. So while I copied files from the server to the drives I decided to turn the spare computer into a Hackintosh.
I got OSX Lion installed fairly easily. attempting to update it didn’t work so well. Neither did trying to install Mountain Lion. What do I think? Now that I’m not obsessed with tweaking my computers, no longer play games that often, my opinion hasn’t really changed. I like the interface, but I would like it to be a bit more tweak-able appearance wise. It still isn’t worth the price of the hardware. It is certainly a fast interface, but no faster than if I were to remove all the unnecessary legacy drivers in Linux, and it isn’t enough faster to bother with doing that. That all being said, I like it. Still not enough to buy a Mac. If you asked me a few years ago I wouldn’t have even taken one if it was free. Now I certainly would. I still wouldn’t buy one, not until they lower the price. Even a bare bottom mini is about $200 more than I could build a similar enough computer for. I won’t be tearing down the Hackintosh anytime soon. It’s been fun to play with, and iTunes clearly runs better on OSX then windows. It didn’t hang once when backing up my iPad or Melissa’a iPod touch.
Like I said, I was backing up the server which turned out to be a good thing as the drive with the OS on it took a dive. A big enough dive that so long as it was plugged in I couldn’t boot to a different one. I guess consumer drives are just not made to last almost 6 years of continuous use. :-) Anyone that’s been reading this for the last year has probably figured out that we’ve been having some issues with drives for the last year. I suspect that they didn’t care for the the salty air and the jostling around of barge shipping from Anchorage for a month last summer. I also suspect the reality is that they’re old and over used, but I’m rather fond of the barge idea.
Not wanting to do this whole rebuild a server thing again, we opted to get a small NAS. I’m rather excited. No more mucking about with administrative tasks and we can use is as a “private cloud” Which I think in this case, is a marketing term for remote file access. It also frees my computer up to do more things that I really don’t need to be doing.
so for now, I’ll rebuild the server with a band-aid one last time.