theParagon

Going from OS 9 to OS X

After 2 years of working on a 300MHz iMac, running OS 9.1 - I finally got the opportunity to trade in the old beast for one with a faster processor. It’s still an iMac but I’m now cruising along with a 700MHz processor, 256MB ram, and sportí in the new OS X (10.2.6).

I’ve been running OS X for a couple months already at home on my iMac and I’ve had my chance to become familiar with the new Operating System. Now that I have it at work, I’m able to fly through projects much quicker with help from various open source applications.

Email Trouble

After the high of getting a new computer wears off you begin to realize the great need to get information from your old computer, onto your new computer. An easy task? Not easy enough, I think.

First I began to load software onto the new computer. Right off the bat I found out that Outlook Express (OE) doesn’t work in OS X. That is to say - Microsoft stopped making it for versions higher than 9.x systems.

Microsoft wasn’t cruel enough to not give you anything - they offer Entourage instead. Except, Entourage is more like Outlook than OE, and it’s not free. The free mail version for Mac is an application called, cleverly enough, “MAIL”. Mail is a dumb downed email client that is great for grandmas and children - but not power users like myself.

Entourage was fine for me but everything I had was in an OE format and on another computer. I did a couple hours of research to see if anyone else had found out a way to convert OE emails over the Entourage email format. All I could find however was a bunch of people helping PC users convert over to the Mac.

After a couple hours of wasted research - I broke down and asked our systems admin if he new anything. Oddly enough he had just figured out that problem for another guy a couple days easier and he simply suggested that I copy the “Microsoft User Data” folder from OE (on my OS 9.1 computer) and place it in “Users/%computername%/Documents/” (on my OS X machine) and I would be all set.

Turns out that it worked great. I loaded that file into the correct place and when starting up Entourage, I told it to import data from that folder. It worked great, copying my Folders, Emails, Rules, Accounts, Signatures, etc…

So that was completed.

Palm Scheduler

My next task was to convert all my Palm Scheduler information to my new machine and into some type of calendar system. I started hacking around with iCal until I finally decided to switch over and use Entourage’s built in calendar system. Entourage’s calendar is almost exactly the same and by using it - it allows me to run one less app in my Dock.

Through a 30 minutes of bang my head against the wall, trying to import my Palm Organizer data over - I finally figured out that I could just copy the whole Palm Organizer data folder over and import it from that. It worked just as well as my email problem.

Things are better

After a good day of figuring out the above details I was finally able to install the rest of my apps and start using OS X productively.

I’ve got Apache running in the background and I’m working on setting it up to be a full-fledged HTTP server for domain hosting and database testing. Possibly in another post I’ll talk about some of the things I’m doing with Apache and some of the Open Source tools that are making my job that much easier. However - at this point, I’ll be surprised if many of my regular readers are still reading with excitement - if at all.

posted on August 25, 2003 | 5:17 PM EST