Preparations

Getting a Mac will be quite a culture shock for me, so I am trying to prepare. A Mac Mini is a "bare bones" machine with no keyboard, monitor and mouse. This is not a problem for me, as being someone who has built his own machines for a number of years now I have an abundance of spare kit. I already have a nice 19" widescreen monitor which came at a fraction of the price of any of the Apple offerings. I am sure the Apple ones are of great quality, but its simply money I didn't need to spend. Likewise the Apple keyboards and mice look very nice, but I am extremely attached to my black IBM keyboards mainly due to the flat inclining wrist rests they have. I even persuaded my boss at work to buy me one as I don't find any other kind of keyboards comfortable. Mice are also something I don't feel the need to invest a great deal of money in either, although this said I can see myself being drawn into the sleek cordless mouse that Apple makes.

I've invested in a Seagate Free Agent 500GB USB hard drive. I rate Seagate hard drives very highly and have always bought them for my machines. This will enable me to use Time Machine to backup all my data, and I can then also share this drive with my laptop. I've had trouble copying data to and from NTFS partitions in Linux, so I am going to wait until the Mini arrives, format the drive into a native Mac file format and then use scp in Linux to copy data over. Certainly not the fastest, but I have had good results with this copying large files before between different operating systems.

The Apple site has a lot of information and videos on OSX, so I downloaded one to my iPod and looked through it. I have also seen that the "Missing Manual" series of books comes highly recommended. I will probably end up buying this, but as a computer nerd I find computers quite intuitive and don't foresee any big gotchas in just getting everything up and running. I advised my mum to get an iBook a few years back, and managed to get that set up without any fuss. Also, the more I read, the more eager I am to get stuck in!