Canllaith.org

I’ve really wanted to start getting into looking at KDE4 and finding places I can be of use, but I didn’t want to be running a broken development environment on my laptop. So, I started looking around for a desktop machine that would have good compile times, and not take up too much space.

Creative Commons licensed imaged used from tachikoma’s photostream

applepenguin is a base model Mac Mini. He’s a Core Duo 1300 1.66Ghz with 512MB of memory and a 60GB disk. It’s running Debian testing, and is currently busily compiling KDE. Qt only took 13 minutes, so I figure this is going to be so much less painful than on my tiny laptop. It’s so small that it fits inside the monitor stand of my desktop computer and makes very little noise. I’m extremely pleased with it, even though it took a little longer than I expected to get Debian onto it. The process went something like this:

• Install updates from Apple onto the preloaded OSX, since this included a mac mini firmware update that was required to get this working.
• Delete half the crap that’s on a stock OSX install. Who needs 2GB of printer drivers?
• Use Apple’s beta bootcamp tool to resize the OSX partition - leaving a little under 30GB for OSX, and 30GB for Debian.
• Install http://refit.sourceforge.net/, which provides an extremely attractive looking bootloader for EFI based machines including the intel mac mini
• Select the rEFIt Partition Tool option from the newly installed bootloader for it to do some MBR magic
• Boot from Debian CD
• Install Debian. Ignore wailing about bootloader. Also ignore wailing about lack of swap partition, since there was no way I was going to allow Debian to touch the partition table to create one
• Install and configure Lilo, using the instructions at http://bin-false.org/?p=17
• Reboot, and be astonished that it actually works
• Realise you somehow ended up with Debian Sid, and have all kinds of shenanigans trying to revert to Lenny.

I don’t really know what I’ll use the OSX it came with for, unless perhaps to play with Qt4 KDE on mac and to troubleshoot any hardware problems I might have since understandably the Apple retailers I bought it from would not be thrilled with supporting issues that came up while it was running Linux. Now I just need to figure out why kdebase is complaining that I don’t have libkio when it’s Right. There.

It’s also going to be handy to use for article writing and things that require me to mangle, break, and otherwise do unpleasant things to my system. Huzzah!