mac mini

I'm using Screen Share to run my Mac Mini from my laptop. I'm running os 10.6 on the laptop.

When I connect the Mac Mini to a monitor, and turn off screen sharing, everything works fine.

When I unplug the monitor from the mini and turn on screen sharing, then try to launch quartz composer, I get this error message:

"Quartz Composer requires an NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 Titanium or GeForce4 MX card or any ATI AGP Radeon card. A minimum of 16mB VRAM is required."

My Mac Mini has a NVIDIA GeForce 9400 with 256MB of Vram.

If I turn off screen sharing, launch quartz composer, then reactivate screen sharing, my compositions won't open, if I launch screen sharing with a composition open, it is just a flat grey panel in the editor window, and no output in the viewer.

Anyone found a way to work with screen sharing on a mac mini in QC? I would like to be able to install the mini up out of reach and run it with screen sharing.

Hey again.

As discussed in this topic, i'm doing an installation involving some hardware sensors and a Mac Mini.

I've gotten quite far, and everything looks good - except I want the computer to be able to be powered down in the normal manner (no force power off / hold power button). The people running the gallery need to be able to reboot if there's any trouble, and shut down for the night. A keyboard won't fit in the installation.

Is there any good way to bypass what Apple calls the "power key window", the one that comes up when the power button is pressed? The one that offers the option to "Restart, Sleep, Cancel, Shut Down"? Ideally, one press of the power button should initiate a normal shutdown directly.

I've looked at UIMode from Carbon, but that simply has the ability to make the power button non-functional. I'm doing a fullscreen app from a modified Apple sample and am not afraid to get my hands dirty with some Obj-C. I'm also not afraid of reading documentation, but can find nothing further on this.

The simple way would be to hand the installation guys a keyboard, and tell them to plug it in before powering down. But that just seems inelegant when all that's needed is one press of the enter key.

Thoughts and anecdotes are, as always, appreciated.

Hello all!

I'm doing an installation where I have to drive a full HD display. I need to play a short loop, and then trigger another loop once in a while (from a sensor). Both loops are short (a few seconds to a minute). Simple stuff, or should be.

The challenge is that I need both HD performance and immediate the ability to switch vids instantly.

From an installation / practical point of view, the Mac Mini looks really tasty. Affordable, small, and quiet. This older Macbook Pro is pretty similar in specs to that one, and I've gotten 1080p to play on this machine without dropping frames as far as I can tell. I've not yet tried the triggering in-depth.

Does anyone out there have a current Mini? How's HD performance?

Or does anyone have other ideas for other soft- / hardware that could do this? Windows or Linux is fine. Or ideas for the most efficient codec to choose?