How iPods vary in price around the world

Brazil continues to be the country where iPods are more expensive than everywhere else. According to the Australian Commonwealth Bank, a 2 Gb iPod nano costs US$ 360 in Brazil and US$ 240 in India. The country where the iPod is sold at the lowest price worldwide is Japan with a price of US$ 147 passing Canada (US$ 154) which used to have the cheapest price.*

Once again the proof of how goods are overtaxed in Brazil, resulting in super high prices that keep people from buying things they need/like and making them pay their bills through installment plans with skyrocketing interest rates.

*Source: Brazilian Newspaper “Folha de São Paulo”, May 23rd 07 [Brasil continua a ter iPod mais caro do mundo].

Linux on a G4 Mac Mini – Let’s try Yellow Dog

Machine:

1.42 GHz G4 Mac Mini (512MB)

[great machine! OS X is also great but it is getting a bit slow at times, that's why I thought of giving it a try with Linux installing both OS X Tiger and Yellow Dog. There are several Linux distributions available for those Macs made before Apple transitioned to Intel processors (i.e. PowerPC Macs with G3 G4 and G5 processors). Linux distributions I've considered were Ubuntu, Gentoo, Mandriva and openSUSE. I ended up downloading Yellow Dog Linux 5.0.1 code-named Phoenix (from the TerraSoft website). This distro is free and its iso has 3.6 GB, I chose it because it's the only one that's made just for the PowerPC architecture and it seems like having a good support].

Linux Distribution:

Yellow Dog 5

(a Fedora Core, RPM-based distribution)
Download the .iso file (from the TerraSoft website) and burn it onto a dvd.

Do some research! Take a look at the TerraSoft site and here or here (in italian ->here).

How to install YDL and OSX (if you want to dual-boot Mac OS and Linux)

Step 1 – Back up your Mac Mini HD [cds/dvds/external HD]

Step 2 – Partition the Mac Mini HD [get out the gray Mac OS X Install Disc 1]

With Mac OS X running, insert the OS X Install Disc 1 that came with the Mac Mini. Run the installer from the disc and, when prompted, hit “restart”. The Mac Mini will reboot and load the OS X installer from the disc.
With the installer running, open on the “Installer” menu in the top left of the screen. Choose “Open Disk Utility”. From here we tell Disk Utility how we want to partition the hard disk. I have divided the 80 Gigs hard drive (real size is 74.5 GB) into 4 partitions:

3 volumes I have marked as “Free Space” (their filesystem – Format – will be specified during the Linux installation)

• one of 2 GB for Linux-SWAP
• one of 14 GB for Linux-ROOT [ext3]
• one of 8.5 GB for shared FAT32 filesystem (for sharing files between OSX and YDL)

1 volume of 50 GB I have marked as “OS X” with the format “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”, which is the Mac OS X filesystem, HFS+.

Once done setting up the volumes as desired, click Partition on the lower right, and quit Disk Utility.

You’re ready to install OS X onto the partition you just created (the 50 GB one in my case).

Now OS X is installed, you only need to insert the YDL DVD and restart the system and make it so it will boot from the dvd-drive (I think I pressed C, I can’t remember). The Yellow Dog installation graphic will appear and you will be guided to choose how to manage the Free Space partitions you have previously created.

[...]

Once you have both OSs installed, when turning on the Mac Mini, instead of rebooting directly into Mac OS X as before, it will now load a bootstrap from which you can hit the letter “L” to boot Linux, or “X” to boot Mac OS X. By default (not hitting any key) it will boot the Yellow Dog Linux.