I’ve never been much of an apple fan boy but since the release of OSX I’ve always had at least one Mac sitting around somewhere… the linux junkie in me can’t resist the BSD backend.

Anyway… one of our good family friends got us a Mac Mini for Christmas and I’ve spent the last 2 days configuring it for family use in the livingroom. I was rather impressed Apple’s with configuration… after booting the mini, it found my bluetooth keyboard/mouse, wireless network, and I was online in a matter of minutes. I was able to mount the samba shares from my linux server with very little effort and even found an easy way to have them automatically mount on boot. woohoo!

Apple’s Frontrow is a nice little app for watching movies, listening to music, and looking at your iphoto albums on the TV, but has several limitations; the most noticeable is the ability to only play items in your itunes library. Falling back on my linux skills, I fired up the terminal and created a symlink to the movies stored on my fileserver… and I was in business.

Brittany was very skeptical of me putting another computer (this makes 8 ) in the house but I can’t help but smile when I see her sitting on the couch browsing all our movies, dvds, and music with a single remote.

Thanks Jerry!