…in the forests of the night.
I “borrowed” the system restore discs for an iMac G5, to try to upgrade the OS on my G4 Mac mini. I tried every crack and hack I could find to get the iMac Tiger discs to install on my Mac mini. Unfortunately “every hack and crack I could find” amounts to two – modifying the .pkg and using a program called XPostFacto. Neither one worked. In both instances, when I tried to actually install, it would simply recognize that my mini was not an iMac, and refuse to install.
So I realized I was being a pirate and decided to do the honorable thing and buy a damn copy of Tiger. I looked at craigslist to see if anyone was selling a copy for cheap. No go. Then I checked other online retail stores. The best I could do was Amazon – I’d save $10, not including shipping. $10 and I’d have to wait?
That did it. I headed down to the Apple Store, plucked a copy of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger off the shelf and stood in line. The tall and lovely black-shirted C. rang up the sale.
“So…” she said, curly brown-haired head hunched over her little handheld computer, stabbing at the screen with the stylus (I have it on good authority that the handheld POS boxes run Windows CE – that authority being my own eyes), “…you’re buying Tiger. That’s exciting.” Her flat tone added irony to her statement.
“Yeah.”
“What do you have?” She asked, marginally more interested.
“A Mac mini,” I said.
Her head jerked up, her brow furrowed and her brown eyes darkened as she mentally paged through Apple’s product line. “But that… that should run Tiger already?”
“No,” I said, sadly, “It’s got Panther on it. It was one of the first ones sold. It’s two years old.”
“Oh.” She nodded. “Oh, right.”
“There’s too many applications that require Tiger now. Time to upgrade. And since Leopard is going to be late, I might as well bite the bullet now.”
The fact is, the main application I want to run on my mini is HamachiX, a Mac OS client for the Hamachi VPN network. It will let me access my home computer over the internets, a very valuable tool. I can then set up secure browsing, have my music and videos available everywhere I’ve got a net connection… and… and… well, that’s all I can think of right now. I’m sure there’s more I can do.
I’m sure of it!