At less than $700.00 (including the 8GB RAM upgrade), I think a Mac Mini is a really good investment for anyone wanting to have a reliable computer that you want to have function as a hypervisor for testing or development. The only downside to the Mac Mini is Mac OS X Lion it self. I’ve read plenty of horror stories on how Lion is Apple’s equivalent of Windows Vista, but man; though when using the Mac Mini, 99% of the time I’m using the Linux/Unix VirtualBox instances. The other 1% percent of the time I’m using Lion, is through the built-in VNC server that Lion ships with, and I have to say it is an absolute pile of shit or nicer words, it is simply broken (which is an known issue). Thus said, at least on the hardware side of things, having used Apple Mac Mini computers as servers for almost 8 years now, I’m expecting my new computer to be rock solid for plenty years to come.

Now, I’m planning on buying the latest Mac Mini model (2.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, at the time of the writing) and planning on turning it into a hypervisor, using VirtualBox.

In short MacPorts is an free and open source package management system built into OS X. (Essentially the BSD UNIX port system). The awesome thing about MacPorts is that it lets you install traditional UNIX userland applications that are not included by default by OS X like wget, and watch.
http://www.macports.org

Just like the author, for quite a while I’ve been kind of annoyed by the fact that Apple doesn’t include this really useful command line utility. So inspired by the one-liner script, I hacked a small watch command line alternative for OS X.

Download watch.rb
sudo cp watch.rb /usr/local/bin
wacht.rb ‘UNIX command‘

Macbook (Leopard)
For some strange reason, I wasn’t able to clone my existing Leopard system to the new 500 GB as the clone process failed about 10% – 15% completion. So I just backed up all my files and installed Snow Leopard from scratch.

Mac Mini (Leopard)
Unlike with my MacBook, cloning the existing Leopard system to the new hard drive worked flawlessly on my desktop Mac Mini.
After that, upgrading to Snow Leopard worked like a charm.

Mac Mini (CentOS)
Upgrading the RAM on the Mini to 2 GB was simple, the hard drive upgrade was a completely different story. First, I wasn’t able to find any open source program that would allow me to clone to an attach mass storage USB drive. Unless I didn’t read the documentation properly, both CloneZilla and FOG only allow the clone output image to be saved on a network system and not locally, even if its a different hard drive.

Little that I knew. dd was everything I needed to clone the hard drive.
commands I used:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

After the dd copy was finished, I rebotted to the new hard drive only to find out that /dev/sda5 , /dev/sda6 and /dev/sda7 were not copied properly to the new hard drive. So I had to reboot into rescue mode using the original CentOS install DVD and ran the following commands:
dd if=/dev/sda5 of=/dev/sdb5
dd if=/dev/sda6 of=/dev/sdb6
dd if=/dev/sda7 of=/dev/sdb7

On my second reboot to the new 500 GB hard drive, Linux was able to boot perfectly fine with all my original settings!!! Until… I opened up fdisk only to find out that I wasn’t able to add partition (I had over 400 GB of free space in the drive) because I wasnt able to modify my existing partition table that consisted of 3 primary partions and 1 extended partition that consisted of three logic partitions within it. So I just download the live GParted program and I was able to created the additional 400 GB logical drive from there.

On the third attempt to boot into the new 500 GB hard drive, Linux had to do filesystem check to /dev/sda7 which happened to be my /home partition. The fsck completely wiped out all of the contents that was in my home directory. Which wasn’t a big of a deal since I already had a full backup of all my files.

Conclusion
Overall upgrading the hard drive on a Mac Mini running CentOS was really painful, but I had the feeling that it could have been worse.

CentOS
GParted Live CD