To daniel.m.tripp.
I enjoy reading your posts. They are always amusing.
iMacs! Yes they are beautiful machines but … they are still Apple and locked into the Apple way of doing things.
I’m from Perth, but now live in California, and a few years ago in Perth I saw an iMac on the verge with other junk ready for a pickup. I thought that I could pick it up as well as anybody else so I stopped and grabbed it. It was a beautiful looking machine, and it still had a DVD movie in the drive. The previous owner had not wiped the HDD effectively so I was able to poke around and find her email address amongst her other emails, and send her an email asking if she wanted the DVD movie back. She was not amused!!
It had a 1 TB HDD in it, which was a waste so I swapped it down to a 500 GB HDD, moved the OS (Snow Leopard) onto the 500 and put the 1TB to better use.
It’s worth knowing that Clonezilla works perfectly with Macs - great for making and restoring running images, but for the early Macs (around 2006) it is important which program was used to burn Clonezilla onto the USB. My choices were Rufus, Balena Etcher and Fedora Media Writer which I had running on my Thinkpad. Sorry that I don’t remember which ones produced an iMac bootable USB stick with Clonezilla but one did and one didn’t. A good Clonezilla restore image allows one to recover pretty quickly and easily from experiments that didn’t work.
I need to know about Macs to support my wife and a couple of other friends with their Macs, but I hate the Macs, even though they do look beautiful. So I currently own three white Macbooks (2006, 2007 and 2008) and two MacBook Pros (mid-2009) in various states of operability. ( Five Macbooks is far too many so I am trying to cut down and sell them off.) And I just gave away a 21" 2008 iMac to a retired and poor friend who only knows OSX.
The world of Macs is a strange one. I bought a MacBook Pro with “bad screen issues” and “For Parts Only” very cheap. True the display looked awful when I started it up but when I opened the display housing I found the video cable had come partially unplugged at the display end. I plugged it in properly and Voila! all issues resolved.
And a couple of weeks ago I bought a WD external 650 GB drive in a thrift store (op-shop) for $3.00 (yes three dollars). It didn’t have a power supply but I had a spare one that worked. I found the drive was formatted to HFS+, and it had a complete Macintosh Time Machine backup on it. I restored it to one of my “experiment” MacBooks and it worked perfectly. Somebody’s life and all their files and documents were suddenly laid bare before me. Mac people can be so paranoid about security but then a complete backup is sold for a song in an op-shop!
But the worst is Mac help forums. In general 80% to 90% of the advice is from helpful but ignorant users who are just guessing, and at least 90% of the advice is very trivial or wrong. Just dealing with the community forums is intensely frustrating.
I wanted to make some mods to my wife’s MacBook Pro to make it a little more flexible, so I checked the file structure and found it is very similar to Linux, as are the commands. I went looking for fstab, but alas, Apple doesn’t use it; they have their own way of doing things. What a pity. So close to flexibility. But …
If Apple could move their OS away from BSD and base it on Linux instead, which should be relatively easy to do technically, they would have a real winner. But I can see that it will never happen.