Free and Creative Again in My Mac
This is a story of resourcefulness with a not-so-new Mac, of
making the best of what is freely available and of letting the life
be without suffering.
I think that one of the things that makes life more rich and
colourful - even meaningful - is the unexpected; the deterministic
chaos that reigns in the universe. Sometimes it strikes as simple
mistakes, sometimes as accidents, sometimes as luck. One who is
confronted by these situations has basically two options: Learn or
suffer.
The choice depends solely on oneself. Once the situation is
given, one has to make it flow.
A few days ago, I was about to upgrade the Fedora Core 6
GNU-Linux I (used to) run in my iBook
G4/1 GHz, along with Mac OS X 10.3, and due to a silly
accident, I erased all the partitions instead of only the one
containing the GNU-Linux installation.
Fortunately, I suffered no major loss of data, since almost
everything was synchronised with my MacBook Pro and some things
lived on my external hard drive. Still, it was striking. All the
effort, all the small customisations, and all the hacks to make
GNU-Linux/PPC work well with audio were suddenly gone.
I only took a deep breath and stared at the FireWire Target Disk
mode icon.
Then I decided, without thinking it over too much, to go back to
a single Mac OS X partition, grabbed the installation disks,
and started all over again. After rebooting to install again, I
played Miles Davis' "Bitches Brew" as a companion to the
installation ritual.
Miles played with the unexpected. He didn't forced the events;
he basically made the necessary conditions to make events flow. He
gave little instructions and made almost no prescriptions. The
music just happened.
After installing everything, I decided that this Mac would be an
example of a low-end Mac as an incredibly and flexible tool, based
on free software running in Mac OS X. This would be a
resource-efficient, non-bloated Mac.
I'm an electroacoustic musician and teacher. I use a lot of
profession-specific tools that might be esoteric to some outside
the field. Most of them only have commercial incarnations or
that ones are easier to use than the free ones. The free tools
might be a little difficult to learn, but they are almost always
more flexible and more rewarding in the end than the commercial
counterparts.
I decided to install the minimum drivers I really use,
not the ones I could probably some time need: There were two
sound interface drivers and a MIDI interface driver. Additional
hacks, two: iScroll2,
a personal favourite that allows me to use double-finger scrolling
in my old Mac, and ScreenSpanning
Doctor, which allows me to override the limitations imposed by
the OS and use two discrete screens.
I decided not to install my copy of Microsoft Office. Too big,
too annoying, and morally incorrect for some - including me. I
stayed with NeoOffice and
AppleWorks.
FreeMind is also
a good free tool when you try to organise your thoughts. I also had
a copy of OmniOutliner.
I use the latter two to plan and build my classes. (Too bad that
Bean doesn't run on Panther).
In the Internet side, I installed Adium for messaging, Firefox for the Web,
and Cyberduck for FTP.
In the music-audio side I decided not to install the proprietary
software - although I owned legal copies - but exclusively free
tools. Here's a list (this information can be useful for meagerly
budgeted but highly needy musicians):
Sound editing and playing:
Sound synthesis / composition:
- Csound. A classic of
computer-music
- MacCsound (a very
good front end for Csound)
- Pd-extended. A
free realtime graphic environment for programming music and
multimedia
- SuperCollider. An
object-oriented language for music/sound.
Notation
- LilyPond, a musical
typesetting language.
- jEdit, for editing LilyPond
files. It highlights syntax and indents as necessary.
- Inkscape, for making
vector graphics. I use it for making graphic scores and for
performance explanations.
Programming
- Processing. A nice
object-oriented multimedia language from MIT.
- Xcode
tools. A friend of mine - an extreme GNU-Linux hacktivist -
says that a Mac is almost nothing without its developer tools. I'm
not that radical; I tend to agree, but not completely.
- Emacs and Vim. I decided to stick to the terminal-based
versions included with the Mac OS, not the "carbonised" ones.
I made an additional decision: not to have more of the
unnecessary data. No obsolete files, no nostalgic-weighted ones. No
more than 2 GB in iTunes music (there used to be 25 GB).
From 6.3 GB free before the beautiful "catastrophe" I jumped to
62.6 GB of free disk space. With all the apps and all the documents
I needed and some installers still lying around.
Now I have a powerful tool, made of a not-so-new Mac and free
software. This will be an experiment on getting the most of the
less, and a demonstration that having the most is not
necessarily related to doing the most. A little escape from
consumerism.
An example of not falling into the downward spiral of
consumerism is Mauricio Bejarano, a colleague of mine - 25 years
older than I am - who still works and makes amazing electroacoustic
music with an old Macintosh Quadra
610 with a SoundDesigner card. He hasn't fallen for ultra-new
equipment that soon will be declared obsolete.
It's not the tool, it's the way you use it.
Daniel
Andrés Prieto García
Departamentos de Artes y Música
Universidad de los Andes
Daniel's Blogspot
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