Snail racing

[mdlbear]

I'm most of the way through the process of upgrading my (work) mac laptop to Tiger, which I had to do because it's needed for a demo on Monday. It's a lot like watching a snail crawl across your screen, with only a little dramatic tension added by the knowledge that, if it falls off, it will explode messily and get little bits of snail pulp all over your hard drive.

Right now I'm installing "xcode", which is what they call the development package. It's been telling me "Time remaining: less than 1 minute" for about 10 minutes now.

It's times like this that remind me why I use Debian as my desktop OS.

update: 14:31 ... and why does it take a fscking reboot and a fscking hour to install X11?? And how do I know it's not leaving little bits of snail pulp all over while it's doing it??? And why did I have to agree to their stupid licence for the fourth time in order to install software that's under the MIT license????

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Yep. The various Debianesque distros are about the only thing I recommend for non-hotrod hardware. The RPM-based ones tend to be rather bloated, even when installed non-gui, and the compile-based ones take forever to upgrade. The only other things left are Slackware, which doesn't have nearly the nice package interface .deb-based OSen do, and SlowLaris 10.... and open source or no, I'm not inclined to mess with anything proprietary-based until somebody like Theo de Raadt paws through the code for a few years. (Yes, he's an asshole. His people do good work, and I appreciate that.)

Which reminds me, now that I'm out of the support biz, maybe I'll drop Dapper Drake on this box... :)

[tiggerypum.livejournal.com]

Uhm, I just installed x11 two days ago because gimp needed it. Didn't take my mac an hour, no where near. Maybe your connection? The age of the mac in question? I'm only on a mini, the older one, not new, and it was fine. Installed easily. So did gimp.

[mdlbear]

It's old, and I misinterpreted the instructions because I didn't notice that the DVD's folder window had a scrollbar, so I ended up running the installer instead of the "add optional software" app. You'd think it might have noticed, but no... it let me go ahead.