Hello all,

Wow! I just received a brand-new iMac as a gift and am having mixed feelings... On the one hand, it's an absolutely beautiful machine; it's a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo, 512Mb RAM and a 20" display. My last Mac was a Mac Plus (9" B/W screen, 1Mb RAM, etc.), I thought it was a great platform back then. However, since then I've migrated to the PC world, first working with Windows and in the last few years with linux. Now Debian AMD64 is my primary OS, and I completely enjoy it (I do mostly development in C/C++, but I'm also a CS teacher and use it for lesson plans and whatnot).

But now with this iMac, I'm wondering -- what I can do with it? I'm really in the dark here! I've heard it's running Unix underneath so I can still have access to all the command line stuff, but what else? I currently have 3 machines, all dual-boot Linux and Windows. Mostly my family uses the linux stuff, we only boot into Windows when we have to. It never occurred to me that I might one day again have a Macintosh.

I guess what I'd like to know is if any of you have setup environments where you find the iMac really useful, and how well it plays along with the PCs you may have.

Thanks!

What I do with my iMac (it's much older than yours).
I fire it up when I need to visit some flash 8 web sites because Linux version of flash 8 is not shipping yet;
and I use it for printing to my Kodak EasyShare printer.

It is not exactly UNIX, but it's POSIX and this means services like CUPS and NFS are natively supported. You can enable root account and have fun from CLI, you can install X server and run X apps ... etc.