To get started, you'll need a few things:

• Mac OS X Install Disc
• Your favorite Linux distribution's install or live CD/DVD
• A CD with refit on it

First off, boot the Mac into your normal OS X installation first and mute the sound. This will get rid of the Mac chime on bootup. It's really difficult to get this done properly outside of OS X, so take the time to do it now. Put your Linux CD/DVD in the drive and reboot. While it's rebooting, hold down the Option key (alt key if you're using a PC keyboard) and you'll have the option to boot from the disc when it boots up. The boot screen might say "Windows" for the Linux CD/DVD, but choose it anyway.

When I installed Fedora, I had to switch the hard drive's partition table from GPT to a plain old "msdos" partition table. Hop into a terminal, start parted on your main hard disk and type mklabel msdos. This will instantly erase the hard drive -- make sure you're ready for this step. If you're using an anaconda-based installation, you can get to a root shell by pressing CTRL-ALT-F2. When you're done with parted in that terminal, switch back to anaconda with CTRL-ALT-F6.

At this point, you shouldn't have any partitions on your disk and you'll be ready to install your Linux distribution normally. I generally put everything in one giant partition as it makes the "bless" step a little easier later on.

Eject the Linux CD/DVD once the installation is complete and toss in the refit CD that you burned previously. Reboot the Mini again while holding Option (or alt key) and choose the disc again at bootup. When refit appears, choose the second icon from the left in the bottom row and press enter. It might say that your GPT partition is empty -- that's okay.

Reboot again, but hold down the Eject key (or F12 on PC keyboards) during boot to eject the refit disc. Pop in the OS X install disc (may need to reboot again to get it to boot) and open a terminal once the install disc fully boots. Once you're in the terminal, run diskutil list to figure out which partition is your boot partition. If you did one giant partition, this should be /dev/disk0s1. Just "bless" the partition to make it valid for booting:

bless --device /dev/disk0s1 --setBoot --legacy --verbose

Reboot again while holding Eject (or F12) to get the OS X disc out of the drive. At this point, you should be ready to go for hands-off booting. My Mac Mini went through about 10-20 seconds of wild screen flickering from grey to black to grey to black but then I saw the familiar Fedora framebuffer.

If you intend to run the Mac Mini headless with Linux, you're going to run into a problem. The legacy BIOS used to boot Linux requires a monitor to be attached, but there are some workarounds. Also, if you want the Mini to power back on in case of a power failure, just run this at each boot:

setpci -s 0:1f.0 0xa4.b=0

Helpful resources:
http://mac.linux.be/content/single-boot-linux-without-delay
http://www.alphatek.info/2009/07/22/natively-run-fedora-11-on-an-intel-mac/

Single boot Linux on an Intel Mac Mini is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.

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I recently picked up a Magic Mouse and discovered that I like almost all of its features. The biggest headache is the funky mouse acceleration curve that it applies by default. When you make small movements, they barely even register on the screen. When you make big movements and slow down a little mid-move, the pointer slows down much too rapidly.

A quick Google search revealed a support discussion post where users were discussing possible solutions. Someone suggested running this in the terminal:

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling -1

That improved things a little for me, but it's not perfect. If you adjust the tracking speed in System Preferences after running this command, the acceleration curve will be reset to the default.

Update: After some tinkering (and further Googling), I found that 0 or .1 seemed to work better for me than -1.

Disable acceleration for Apple's Magic Mouse is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.

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Here are the steps to migrate your iTunes data from one Mac to another without having to erase and re-sync your iPhone:

• Make sure that iTunes is not running on both Macs.
• Disconnect your iPhone/iPod from both Macs.
• Copy your iTunes folder.
  /Users/username/Music/iTunes
• Copy your iPhone/iPod backups.
  /Users/username/Library/Application Support/MobileSync
• Copy your iTunes configuration files.
  /Users/username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iTunes*
• Open iTunes on your new Mac and verify that Applications and Ringtones appear.
• Connect your iPhone/iPod to the new Mac and accept any new authorizations.
• Use iTunes on your old Mac to de-authorize the computer.

If you choose to keep your MP3's separate from iTunes (and not in the library), this will only copy over the references to the MP3 files themselves.

Syncing an iPhone with a new Mac without hassles is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.

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