This message posted from my iMac

Tdarcos · Post by **Tdarcos** » Sat Jul 19, 2014 11:27 am

To add to my collection of computers, for about $100 ($65 plus $35 shipping) I was able to purchase an iMac, which gives me another x86-based computer to work with. This includes its own monitor, which is the computer, has 3 built-in USB ports plus a few other ports, which I suspect includes IEEE 1394 (Firewire).

The reason it's fairly cheap is there are some lines on the monitor, they don't interfere with using the computer but make it less valuable for resale, which is fine for me; I just want to use it to do software development, e.g. for Intel-Mac based app development. I currently have the computer in the living room because I don't have a place for it in my room.

The keyboard itself serves as a USB hub, and has two USB sockets. It comes with a built-in webcam, speakers, and WiFi. I was going to install a $9 Tenda adapter, only problem was I wasn't given the administrator password. So I discovered that if you boot the mac in single-user mode, you get a standard shell, at which point you remove one specific file, and reboot, because that file isn't there, the operating system thinks it did not finish setup and allows you to create an Administrator account.

It has a really pretty startup video for OS X. It also then detected what wireless networks were available and allowed me to connect to mine, so I won't even need to install the Tenda adapter or the driver for it. The iMac even recognized the new 4-TB Buffalo NAS and can access files on it (I copied a movie for testing because its network connection is too slow to stream off the network; it tends to stall sometimes.)

As with the other Mac I installed Firefox so I can use the same browser on all machines (I used Safari to download it), and next I'll install Free Pascal here. (If the conditions are the same as with the PowerPC mac, I'll need to install XCode, which is some sort of development system or library or something, I'm not sure; I bought a book in the $4 range on Amazon about XCode and I should be getting it in a few days.)

Tdarcos · Post by **Tdarcos** » Sat Jul 19, 2014 12:07 pm

The video it shows when it is first setup was uploaded to YouTube so this is what it looks like:

[youtube][/youtube]

Tdarcos · Post by **Tdarcos** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 9:18 am

if you saw my latest cooking video, my iMac appears (intentionally) in one of the post-production scenes.

Otherwise, here's a picture.