Open Office runs under X11 in OSX. It's clunky at the best of times but it works ok.
You want to upgrade the memory for sure, especially if not all the applications are Intel native (Universal Binaries) ... many are (with some major exceptions like Adobe CS and Microsoft Office both of which are due out sometime next year). The one's that aren't run through Rosetta -- an on the fly x86->PowerPC emulator that sucks up TONS of memory. The more the merrier. My girlfriend has an intel mac mini and with 512MB ram using M$ Office it is horrid, it swaps out switching from one doc to the next. Tomorrow she gets upgraded to 2G ram in the little beast and then she should be fine. She spends the majority of her time in M$ Office unfortunately :/ But reports are with lots of ram it runs just fine (which is a feat unto itself considering it's doing on the fly low level translation like that). I'm honestly amazed at the performance level for most apps (as long as it's not games or photoshop hehe).
Firefox runs fine on OSX, pretty much on par with the windows/linux versions. Some bitch it's a bit slower on OSX, I can't really tell the difference much unless I'm trying to render a massive page and then it is a tad slower, but nothing to worry about. Also Safari comes with OSX and is a pretty good browser, I use it for 85% of my stuff. Also there is Opera which works very well on OSX as well as a bunch of other Gecko/Core Web based browsers. Lots of workable options there and all FREE.
And yes, having a native bash shell is the main thing that pulled me back to using OSX instead of Linux as my main workstation
You'll want to check out and install fink (
http://fink.sf.net). apt-get for OSX is a wonderful thing for the small handful of command line utils that don't already ship with the OS, like apt-get install wget
Dunno about the drive upgrade options.
The WPA/WPA2 SPK are both there and work fine. Not sure what the deal with the 11n is .. the hardware is 11n for sure, but it's probably just not setup to do much of anything yet OS wise, they are probably holding that out for the next OS update -- but of course it might also "just work" already.
That's the one great thing I love about OSX, for the most part things "just work" .. I spend much much less time fighting with drivers and upgrades and more time hacking!
Mark
