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I have been using a Mac(book Pro 13”) for work this summer, and I’ve loved it. It’s been so nice to not have to reboot every few days to fix intermittent problems, to have {Flash, sound, monitors} work correctly, to have flash video play smoothly, to have nice UI, etc.

I’ve been thinking for a while of getting a Mac Mini, and this summer with my mac has basically solidified my decision. I’m going to keep my Ubuntu box around, headless, for development and file serving and stuff, and I’m getting the Mini on my birthday in a week.

I’ve been getting various things working well for that to happen, and I decided to share my efforts. So far, I have:

● File Sharing: A drive on my Ubuntu box acting as a “Time Capsule”, as well as basic sharing of my home dir in a reasonable way. This also lets me store my iTunes library on Ubuntu if I so desire.

● SSH: A shortcut to an SSH session with my ubuntu box, without having to type my password each time. (Make sure you drag the shortcut to the right hand side of the dock; you can’t have files on the left). Since this will be a Mac Mini, i’m just pointing it to my local IP address, for speed. With a Macbook, it would probably be best to have a local and remote version (assuming you have a public IP address) Also, I occasionally use SSH tunnels, (for app engine, et al) and I’m working on a good shell script to get that set up.

● Ubuntu-only apps: X11 installed for X forwarding (can’t be done through the shortcutted ssh session, working on that). Found out how to do it (scroll down to “Optional: Turn on Automatic X11 Forwarding”). You can even make dock icons for them.

● My Model M: Synergy as a PS/2 adapter + key remapper (my Model M lacks a command key, so my plan is to map ctrl->command & caps lock -> ctrl, at least for now).

● Desktop sharing: Chicken of the VNC for VNC (client side) and tightvncserver configured for running headless server side.

● Printer sharing has been a pain in the ass. I have a manually added shared printer that is keyed to my IP address, but that’s frusturating, as it’s just another thing to change if my IP changes. There’s supposedly a way to get it working with the default network printing mechanism, but I haven’t figured it out yet.

● Dock icons for Ubuntu GUI apps: Automater lets you run shell scripts from dock applications, so I just run $echo “quodlibet” | ssh -X cyanide . It’s not perfect, because the windows show up under X11, not under the dock icon. But it works.