The unix “eject” command doesn’t work on a mac (as far as I know), but there is a command that you can use to eject a disk from the command line. Type “diskutil list”, and find what you want to eject (in the format /dev/diskX), and type “diskutil ejectDisk /dev/deskX” to eject it.
(Everything without quotes.)

I don’t know about the eMac but my iBook g4/1.2GHz with 768MB of RAM running OS X 10.4 is still very usable and it is actually my main machine, and it feels quite a bit faster than my old AMD Duron/1.3GHz tower with 768MB of RAM running my own linux distro, which I suspect is due to PowerPC processors generally being faster on same MHz as Intel and AMD processors of the time. I’d recommend using TenFourFox (currently based on Firefox 10 ESR) as your main browser because it is the only current graphical browser you don’t have to fight to get to work. Also don’t install adoble flash and remove it (and maybe java) if it is installed. You can use MacTubes or YouView to view youtube videos.

Is it just me or did you say Actually just waaay too much? lol. Cool site dude, love it.

@ MrJones2015:

Yes, though sometimes it takes me a while. Like today. :)

@ Ian G. Clifton:

Yes, that’s exactly how it works. Most apps ship as .dmg packages which are basically disk images. From what I read, they are similar to iso images. Most developers like to have a little window pop up when the thing mounts with the .app, the application folder shortcut and a little arrow between them.

Not everyone does that though. Vim for example shipped as .tgz file containing just the .app file. I have also seen a few aps that user traditional installer type thing.

@ Rob:

Is it bad that I knew exactly what this was from without even clicking that link. My other favorites include:

* I’m going to create a visual basic GUI to track their IP address
* Don’t worry, I speak leet

Groans-worthy! :P

@ Elysa:

Yeah, the only thing that I really want from 10.5 is spaces, but I can live without them I guess. Oh, that and Google Chrome – no Tiger version for some strange reason. I can’t believe Google did the Tiger users dirty like that.

@ Travis McCrea:

The command and options buttons are pretty much just Windows Key and left Alt so that works fine. The Print Screen, Scroll Lock and Pause Break buttons seem to act as the “extra” function keys.

Oh, and a generic two button Microsoft mouse works just as you would expect it to – the RMB is basically bound to Command-Click out of the box. :)

@ Sapientidiot:

Oh, I didn’t know Arch had a PPC version. I know that I was unable to get it to work on any of the Presario machines I owned due to an unsupported CPU type. :P

I love my 1Ghz iBook G4. I run ArchLinuxPPC on it, and its suprisingly fast (especially in comparison to OSX). It did take some serious work to install (well really just to boot), but the few folks who do use still work on it are very helpful.

Ubuntu has a really great PowerPC version. On my old PowerBook I only had a CD drive which meant that I could only go up to 10.2 (I believe), and even that ran VERY SLOWLY. So I upgraded it to Ubuntu (Intrepid I believe was the distro-of-the-day), and it became one of my favourite computers.

Also the F12 key is not a button that you use because you are using a non-apple keyboard. F12 is also what you press on an apple keyboard. But I don’t know how your “options” and “command” buttons work. http://www.geekologie.com/2007/08/15/apple-keyboard.jpg there is a layout of an apple keyboard. They probably correlate accordingly.

Great find btw, I almost bought an eMac at the time, it was really cheap and really nice for the time. Then again the iMac flatscreen with the small little base looked nicer. Do they still do the iMac? that was sexy.

So here is my suggestion: Put a light weight linux distro on it (maybe Ubuntu with a different windows manager — gnome will work, but will probably be clunky) THEN put a mac theme on it. :)

*cough* usually a lurker, not a commenter *cough*

As one of those rare early adopters of the Mac, I can tell you that given the specs of your machine, there probably would not be any visible performance improvements in upgrading to 10.5. In my experience, 10.4 (Tiger) was very solid. The main differences between 10.4 and 10.5 (besides the transition from PowerPC to Intel, which removed support for many OS 9 “classic” programs) is native support for 64-bit applications–from a developer’s standpoint, at least. Changes in end-user features are significant, but may or may not be important to you. (I still don’t know what you’re going to use it for…) My favorite are improvements to Spotlight (Boolean operators, booya!), Finder, Quick Look, and Spaces (virtual desktops).

I think that whether you decide to upgrade or not depends on how often you’re going to use this machine and what you’re going to use it for. Whereas I am happy to pronounce Panther (10.3) obsolete, I think Tiger is still functionally relevant.

It’s a Unix system, I know this!

10.5 was the first version of OSX that I used, so I can’t comment on 10.4. I remember the first time I installed something on there. It essentially had a window with an icon representing the app and an icon representing the applications folder. The background had an arrow that made it obvious that you drag the app into the folder to install it (also worth noting: the .app file is actually a folder containing the binary, config files, etc.). I thought that was pretty neat, but the lack of organization in the applications folder itself is painful. Fortunately I was introduced to Quicksilver very early on.

Being built on Unix/*BSD, you’ll find a lot of the commands work as expected. But, if you’re like me, you’ll be thrown off just a little now and then when you have to remember to use curl instead of wget or Users/name instead of home/name. Some of the packages seem to be pretty out of date too. I believe the shortcut keys are specifically designed to not make sense (like taking a screenshot), and it’s not easy to get shortcut keys set up for some really common tasks (locking the screen or opening a new terminal, for instance).

It’s kind of funny to look at the specs of that machine and realize how quickly technology has changed. My year-old Nexus One has a 1GHz processor and 512MB of RAM, so not too far off, haha. The Motorola Atrix as CES has a dual core 1GHz processor and 1GB of RAM! My brain is still recovering from learning about that phone, haha.

What makes commenting on this blog fun is that you actually answer to every single comment :D