I was sitting around reading reviews on Conroe and Merom systems the
other day, and they were talking about total system power consumption
in excess of 200 watts, I thought to myself why can't they make systems
low power consumption like my Intel (Yonah0 based Mac Mini? Then an idea
struck me, I use an external firewire drive as my main boot drive and
the factory internal 80GB drive is unused so lets see if I can get
BlueQuartz to run on it!
First I made sure I had the latest Mac Mini firmware.
Then I fired up the MacOS X Disk Utility program and used it to change
the partition map of the 80GB drive to MS-DOS.
I powered of, unplugged my Firewire external drive and iPod to be safe,
put in a NuOnce 4.3 installer, powered on the Mac Mini holding down
the C key so it would boot off the CD and a few seconds later I was in
the NuOnce installer. The fun begins.
I had read reports that there were problems with using GRUB on Macbooks in
the Ubuntu forums, so I selected a LILO based single drive install. That
went through fine and 5 min later it had completed, first minor glitch
the press enter to reboot did not work, so I power-cycled, which worked
fine and the system booted and I was able to login and complete the setup.
I thought I should run a yum update, bad move! The update installed a
new kernel that caused all sorts of trouble, USB keyboard went flaky
strange rediscovery of Ethernet hardware on boot up etc. I ended up having to
telnet into the system and edit the /etc/lilo.conf file to use the SMP kernel
by changing the line default=2.6.9-34.0.2.EL to default=linux and then doing
a lilo -v which after reboot bought the system back to stability.
I noticed that other BQ machines don't have SMP kernels, not sure if that's a
modern thing that the 4.3 installer adds.
Overall, the Mac Mini makes a fine server, it's way faster than my Raq550,
takes up less rack space, and there is a full reseller channel for spares,
and it's cheap!
- Ernie.