Old Mac Mini.

[Lufbrarunner]

I have just acquired an old Mac Mini (A1103) circa 2005. Running OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard)
1gb Ram, 60gb HDD, 2 X USB, 1 X firewire 400, Ethernet, DVI, 1.25ghz PowerPC (G4) processor.
It has got MS Office 2008 and Adobe Photoshop Element 6 installed. I have managed to get Python 3.1 installed, and I had to hunt down a browser (TenFourFox) as Safari could not open some secured websites.
I had to hunt through the garage for a wired mouse and keyboard then had to re-solder the mouse connection has it had broken away from the wiring also had to find a DVI to VGA adaptor.
All seems to be working o/k at the moment, in fact I am using it to produce this post.

 

[honestone]

Sounds way cool! Hopefully you'll get a lot of use out of it.

Also, just in case, you can, most likely, purchase a wired mouse, and probably rather cheap.

 

[oldscribe]

Hi,

Yes I agree with honestone using older Apple products can be real fun, and hunting for relevant software leads to many useful repositories.

I had to hunt down a browser (TenFourFox)

Blisteringly fast browser which I use on our 2006 iMac powerpc, just sad that it will not run on any intel machines.

 

[Lufbrarunner]

I have been using this for a week now and although it is slow by today's standards it is working well enough.
I have set up the email, I can SSH & FTP files across the network and it handles most of my programming needs.
I have an external SSD attached for extra storage and have been looking at swapping the internal ATA drive for an SSD. I can clone the OS to an SSD but cannot boot to an external USB device. I have ordered a ATA to SATA converter to give it a try. Another option is to use a firewire 400 drive caddy to boot to an external drive. I can certainly say this is keeping me busy