5/10.... Grrrr!

So I bought myself a new iMac, yesterday, a G5 top-of-the-line 20-incher with a 1.8GHz processor and a gig of RAM. This is part of my ongoing home studio build. Instead of buying a new bit of audio hardware, I figured I might as well up the processing power.

In the couple of years I've had my old G4 iMac, Apple have introduced what looks like a fantastic feature, which is the option to transfer all your accounts, files, applications, and settings from an old Mac by connecting the two together with a FireWire cable and booting the old one into Target Disk Mode.

About halfway through my time-shifted viewing of Desperate Housewives last night, I'd have awarded this process 10/10. It really works brilliantly, totally transparently. And though it told me it would take 3 hours to transfer 40GB or so of data, it really only took about half that time.

But there was a fly in the ointment. Right at the beginning of the process, I was asked about the existence of two accounts called "Rob." Did I want to change the name of the old one? Or did I want to replace the new one with the old one? On the horns of this dilemma, I made the wrong choice, to change the name of the old one to "oldRob" and keep the new one pristine. It was a new 'puter and I just wanted the old files, really, wasn't bothered too much about anything else. Mot of my innernet bookmarks are kept elsewhere, so there was nothing too crucial.

But this was the wrong thing to do, for two reasons. First, the account oldRob was locked out of most of the rest of the Mac - all the folders had No Entry signs, and were locked. Second, new Rob was locked out of everything belonging to oldRob.

It's an OSX permissions thing. For example, try to open an oldRob iMovie project, and you were denied. Go into Get Info (Command-I) and change the permissions, you could open the project, but you couldn't edit or apply any effects to existing clips, because they still belonged to oldRob, so you got an error. In other words, you had to unlock everything. Using Disk First Aid to repair the permissions was no help, you had to do it manually.

So then I thought, fuckit, I'll just archive the oldRob account, which is useless to me as it stands. But then you end up with a disk image file, which you have to mount and then keep entering your password in order to copy files out of it. Long story short, the one-and-a-half-hour brilliance of copying everything over was torpedoed because I chose incorrectly when asked about the accounts - a dumb-ass end-user error, which I'll now be paying for for months. Unless I wipe it and start from scratch, which is just too depressing a thought.

Otherwise, I guess I'm happy with it. The 20-incher is a bit of a beast: heavy and imposing, but elegantly slim. And the industrial design of the inner workings is simply stunning, of course - the main reason for buying Apple. But I don't think it looks as nice, or as elegant, as the old G4 iMac, the controversial "sunflower" design, which was derided by some wankers as "anglepoise". To me, having something as superb as the sunflower iMac in an ordinary home was just an extraordinary, wonderful thing. I don't feel the same about the "tombstone" flat panel design, which to me is clever under the surface but a bit of a monstrosity.