I finally got a chance to unpack and try out my new Mac Mini this past Friday.  The packaging was pretty neat, but I suppose I was expecting something cool looking anyway considering this is an Apple product.

My overall impression of the hardware and OSX is good.  However, the Terminal.app lacks some good terminal emulation.  Backspace, PgUp, PgDn, and a few other things do not work as expected.  When ssh'ing to other Linux/FreeBSD hosts, I've had to use ^H for backspace, and some odd hackery to view scrollback in my Irssi screen.  After fiddling with the $TERM settings for a little bit, I ended up trying out GLterm.  The emulation in this terminal emulator is flawless, but it lacks transparency.  Since this is completely OpenGL-based, I guess transparency isn't going to happen any day soon.

As far as a universal DivX, XviD, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, etc player, for the time being I've been using VLC.  It seems to work fine, but I've noticed some tearing in the video output.  I tried out MPlayer and that seemed to work well, too.

I don't really like iTunes, and I figured I would stay away from it for awhile.  Using XMMS via XDarwin seems to work, but it lacks whatever output plugin it needs to access the Apple-ish sound system.  There's no /dev/dsp in OSX.  I've been sticking to mpg123 (no mpg321 in Fink ... or was it just renamed?) and some shell trickery to generate something that resembles a playlist.

Oh, yeah, Exposé is really neat.  I wish I had multiple workspaces, though.  Guess that's something I'll have to investigate tomorrow after work.  I should start packing, now.  Back to Charlotte tomorrow!

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