Mac OS X (despite its user-friendly UI and the general ease of use) is built on Darwin kernel which means thats it is a UNIX system. Using the terminal (it is located in application>utilities folder) you can easily get some valuable info about your mac. If you run Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, you have the ability to boot with the 64-bit kernel instead of the 32-bit that loads by default (Apple has chosen the 32-bit as the default boot kernel to prevent glitches caused by 32-bit kernel extensions). To boot with the 64-bit kernel you need a Mac with an Intel Core 2 duo or newer processor (Intel Core Duo does not support 64-bit) and 64-bit capable EFI. To check if your EFI supports 64-bit, open the terminal and type the following command:

ioreg -l -p IODeviceTree | grep firmware-abi

If the terminal returns “EFI64″ as shown in the image below you are ready to go. Just restart your mac holding “6″ and “4″ numeric keys and it will boot with the 64-bit kernel. Note though that in a typical system (for example a core 2 duo mac with 2 to 4 GB of RAM), there will be no significant performance improvement. Also even with the 32-bit kernel, you can run 64-bit applications and take full advantage of 64-bits (that is not a Snow Leopard feature. Leopard was able to run 64-bit apps and adress more than 4GB of RAM too).

Some other important info you can easily get about your portable mac from the terminal, is your battery condition. Type the following in the command line and you the terminal will return your battery’s max capacity, current capacity and design capacity.

ioreg -l | grep Capacity

If you see that max capacity is lower than design capacity do not panic, batteries start to loose capacity after some charging cycles.

Linux Mint is a linux distribution, based on Ubuntu, which is aimed to be user friendly and comes with out-of-the-the-box multimedia support (Java, Flash etc). Linux Mint uses the same repositories as Ubuntu does and the latest version, called Celena, is available in two versions: Main version which is packed with copyrighted stuff and Light version which is packed with open source, GPL licensed stuff only.

Linux Mint is different from Ubuntu though. The interface is much more elegant and smart. Icons are well-designed and the Gnome main control bar is moved to the bottom side of the screen. Main menu is replaced with SLAB. Live search is supported when browsing applications, wich makes app detection much easier. On desktop, there are only three icons: Computer, Home and Installation. Double clicking the computer icon will show your drives, home will bring you to your files folder and installation will guide you to full install Linux Mint (install icon appears only when running the distribution using the Live CD).

Mint is packed as mentioned above with the lates Kernel version and with the many well known open source apps: Amarok, OpenOffice, Gimp, Thunderbird, Totem, Firefox, Pidgin and Java. Beryl/Compiz is also available for 3D desktop lovers (you need to install manually or using Envy the ATI or Nvidia drives for your graphics card). Java and Flash plugins are also preinstalled which means that you can view every web site on the internet correctly.

Linux Mint can install (one-click installation) .mint packages using the MintInstall feature. Here you can find many apps in this format, including Google Earth. The most important point is that the distribution contains drivers for almost any WiFi card and MintWifi app makes Wifi configuration a piece of cake. MintDisk allow users to view and manage NTFS partiotions without installing other software.

To install and run Linux Mint you need a PC with 1Ghz processor and 512 MB or RAM. This distribution is suitable for amateur Linux users and users that want an easy-to-handle Linux operating system.