So far, it’s set up to:

1. Work as a sort of Airport Extreme-equivalent, serving up my iTunes Library from an external drive.
2. Run Azureus, which is slurping down telly programmes as they appear in various RSS feeds, or controlled manually with this handy Dashboard widget.
3. Work as storage for automatic backups of important stuff on my new computer using rsyncx.

This is all rather boring and easy to achieve, but I can’t think of anything exciting and difficult to have a go at, which seems a waste of what is still a pretty powerful wee computer.

Any ideas?

It turns out that there’s really quite a big difference between a five-year-old iBook with a 700MHz PowerPC G3 and 640 MB of RAM and a brand new MacBook Pro with a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 2 GB of RAM.

Thanks Mom and Dad. Best. Early. 30th. Birthday. Present. Ever.

That black paintjob comes at a premium, you see: if you upgrade a white MacBook to exactly match the specs of a standard black iBook, it’s £89.99 cheaper. Really.

On the one hand you almost have to admire Apple’s chutzpah, flogging a computer at a premium simply by changing the colour and implying it’s the top of the range is a wonderful bit of smoke and mirrors manipulation.

On the other hand, what will you think when you see someone with a black MacBook? You’ll think, ‘Ha ha, that total cock blew nigh on a ton to get his computer in black! He’s a CockBook user! Ha ha! CockBook!’ Or similar. Which might harm sales a touch. No one wants to look like a total cock, after all.

Tiger here I come.

On the plus side, all my precious (but unbacked-up) data is safe. On the downside, the cost of a replacement screen, plus labour and VAT, is roughly equal to the current value of the computer. Bugger.

I must say, though, that being reunited with my elderly handbag iBook, which for a long while has been doing nothing but quietly and automatically downloading telly via Bittorrent, hasn’t been too bad. I’d forgotten what a great, fast-typing keyboard it has (awkwardly placed tilde key and tiny wee Return key aside), and its sluggish ways (the poor thing is somehow managing to run OS 10.3.8 with 128MB of RAM) have pushed me into the Terminal, in which I’ve been doing absolutely everything bar looking at the world wide web. Clever stuff, that command line business.

See you all when I get back, unless I can get internet access on my telephone, in which case, there will probably be photographs of stuff like this.

Amazingly, installing it was a breeze - I was under the impression that Linux was a text-only hell where a careless bit of typing could make your computer turn into a frog, but it turns out everything is GUI’d up the wazoo nowadays. The Yellow Dog installer even recognised my Airport card, and configured it correctly, so I was on the internet as soon as I booted up. Nice.

Other things, though, have had me tearing my hair out. Since I’ve never used anything but a Mac, everything seems wildly counter-intuitive. For example, when I put a CD in the drive, I pretty much expect an icon to show up on my Desktop so I can start dragging files off it. This is not the Linux way, and it took the assistance of the geekiest man I know to get a CD working at all (cheers c0NZ!). For the record, you have to type mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom mnt/cdrom. Which is not exactly something you’d guess by yourself.

Once c0NZ gave me a couple of tips, though, everything started to fall into place a bit, and I’ve now sorted out accessing files from my new iBook over the WLAN, and am happily playing MP3s and audio CDs as I type. Funnily enough, it’s simple things like that that are hard on Linux (or at least this version of it) while complicated things like getting an Apache webserver running are a piece of cake.

Despite all the head-scratching, installing Yellow Dog looks like it will be worth the effort of getting used to Linux beyond the occasional bit of tinkering in the Terminal on OS X, simply because the computer is now lightening fast. When running OS 10.3.4, my old iBook (a Graphite SE with sod all RAM) wasn’t exactly speedy, but now it’s snappy as can be, only getting a wee bit sluggish when launching big applications like OpenOffice or the GIMP (the Linux equivalents of Word and Photoshop).

Apologies in advance for the inevitable slew of posts in the coming weeks about just how fabulous and exciting Linux is.