Shiny!

[mdlbear]

Power and internet finally came back at work at about 11:30, by which time the flower_cat and I had managed to assemble an early lunch of Pon-Pon Chicken (basically shredded cold chicken, cucumber strips, and peanut sauce).

Sometime around 2pm our sysadmin came back from his Fry's run with my shiny new 15.4" Macbook Pro. It's the high-end one, with a 2.1GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a 100GB disk (actually more like 95, with almost 25GB of stuff already on it). It took the rest of the afternoon for it to download something approaching half a gig of updates over our T1 line. Meanwhile, I installed Firefox, fink, X11, the software development kit (called, for some unguessable marketing reason, X-code), and Emacs21, and copied my ssh keys over from my desktop.

Now, people who know me and my operating-system preference (Linux) may be wondering why I decided to get a Mac laptop. You may well ask. There are several reasons:

• The main reason is that I'm going on a business trip next week and wanted to take along a very reliable, reasonably fast laptop with well-supported WiFi, good battery life, and a decent-size screen and hard drive. The Mac qualifies.
• Everyone else in my group has a Mac, and several of them are developing software on it. Most of the guts are in Java, but the GUI and other wrappers are, at the moment, Mac-specific. We give demos.
• I have one, too, but it's ancient. The display has a couple of vertical lines, the battery comes loose at unpredictable times and shuts it down, it's horribly slow, and the case is coming apart.
• There are many documents floating around the lab and out in cyberspace in formats that aren't well supported by Linux applications. Admittedly, not all are supported on the Mac, either, but most are.
• MacOS X is a darned weird excuse for a Unix, but at least it is a Unix, and it ships with X11 and a reasonably complete set of GNU utilities and development tools. fink, which is basically a Debian apt repository for the Mac, takes care of most of the rest.
• I can't stand the trackpad as a pointing device, but it has USB and bluetooth -- I'll find something.
• This is an Intel Mac that we're talking about, and Linux does run on it. Dual-booting, and eventually virtualization, are definitely in the plan, though I might not have them done by next week.
• It was time. I think I held the lab record for oldest laptop still in regular use. (We're not even counting the semi-functional tablet, 166MHz mini-laptop, 90MHz mini-server, Netwinder, and other ancient artifacts presently cluttering up my office.)

And, of course, it's a nice shiny silver color. Our traditional naming scheme is rivers, and my personal scheme is "rivers of Middle Earth", so I'll probably go with silverlode. It also ties back to the Silvermine River, that runs near my parents' old house in Connecticut.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

W00t.

Which Linux are you dual-booting? I have brand spanking new Ubuntu discs...

[mdlbear]

Probably Ubuntu. I have recent disks, though it's Ubuntu Dapper rather than Edgy. I may try the latest Debian Etch first. Do you have any idea whether any distribution can handle a Mac directly without using Boot Camp?

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Unknown as to whether Ubuntu can. RHEL has announced plans to do it, but that was back in January and I haven't heard anything since.

Oh, *right*, you're going to *OSCON*. Hell, ask them. I've had my head so far down in apps and switches I haven't had *time* to keep up with what the OS'en are doing.

But, yeah, if you don't get your Dapper CD's there I'll be bringing some with me to cflute's... I ordered a pretty fair assortment. :)

[mdlbear]

I expect to pick up a stack at OSCon to take home -- last year they had Ubuntu, Novell/Suse, and a couple of others.

See you at cflute's!

[mdlbear]

Some quick googling makes it clear that installing any Linux on a MacTel box is still a non-trivial undertaking. There probably aren't any distros yet that will install directly off the CD.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

(I can bring'em next weekend...)

[mdlbear]

Even if I didn't have them, I somehow don't think I'd have any trouble finding them at an Open Source convention. But thanks.

[ravan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I got to provision and pass out several MacBooks at work. None for me.

I can't bring myself to buy one yet. Too much $$.

[mdlbear]

Wouldn't have bought one for myself with my household budget in its current state. Luckily I didn't have to.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Try an air mouse maybe?

[mdlbear]

I've tried some of their earlier efforts -- clunky on the desktop as a mouse, and only marginally useable in the air. A small bluetooth trackball if I can find it.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

oh, I see. Bah, breathless reviews.

I really have come to appreciate the large size of the Mac's touchpad and button; I have this Compaq with little tiny mouse buttons and it's awkward and, if I get careless, actively dangerous. I generally find DarwinPorts superior to fink, btw, though that may depend on what software you use. Learning the Debian tools takes quite a bit of study, and I'd much rather spend my time on cranky modeling software these days.

[mdlbear]

The new air mouse may very well be a vast improvement -- I'm just skeptical.

I really have trouble with the trackpad; the larger one just means more area for my thumbs and wrists to brush against and move the cursor to someplace totally random. One of the major problems with the MacBook is that almost everything -- drag, page down, home, whatever, ends up being a two-handed operation.

Since I've been running Debian at home and at work for several years, the learning curve isn't a problem.

[finagler.livejournal.com]

Note that Parallels will let you run Linux and OS X simultaneously, if you don't feel like rebooting. And actually, older Macs can dual-boot with Linux as well (Yellow Dog is the most popular for PPC, but you can do Ubuntu as well).

And yeah, I'm totally with you on the shiny and silver...

[mdlbear]

Parallels will work for some things, though I'm not sure how well it handles keyboard events. It will almost certainly not work for multitrack audio or anything else that requires a low-latency kernel. I've also heard that you can't use it to boot from an existing Linux partition, though it may just be difficult rather than impossible. I'd settle for being able to mount it.

Dual-booting is apparently significantly easier on older macs than on the new ones -- mostly a matter of the distros not having caught up, but there are other issues due to the new pre-boot environment.

Parallels

[andyheninger.livejournal.com]

I've started playing with Parallels a little on my Mac Mini. Only with Windows, so far. It seems to work, the installation of XP was completely smooth, but mouse tracking and vanilla 2d video response are below what I would really prefer. I'm very happy NOT to have to partition the disk.

For Linux under Parallels, it might be interesting to try using the native Mac X server, which should avoid pushing everything through semi-brain-dead virtualized video hardware.

Audio software for Intel Macs seems to be in an sort of mixed state right now.

• Audacity has no universal binary, and the PPC binary crashes on launch.
• Cubase LE (came bundled with a Presonus Firebox external audio box) fails on install.
• The Presonus driver seems to have occasional stability problems that require a reboot to clear. The symptom is no audio after waking a sleeping system.
• SoundEdit (bundled with some Macs, but not with the Mini) seems to be very reliable for recording.
• Garage Band works, but I haven't had the time to really understand everything it does. It's approach to editing is different from what I'm used to - once captured in an initial recording, the audio file is never altered. Instead, all edits or effects are kept symbolically and applied dynamically when playing or exporting.

I'm sure that you are right in thinking that boot camp will be the only way to do reliable audio work under Linux on the Mac.

Re: Parallels

[mdlbear]

I've heard that Audacity is unstable on Macs. The way Garage Band works sounds very Audacity-like -- it breaks the audio into 1MB chunks and puts all the edits into an XML file.

Using Mac X instead the virtualized device sounds like the way to go on Parallels, but I'll start with Boot Camp and Debian if I want to use it for Debian.

Re: Parallels

[andyheninger.livejournal.com]

Curiosity got me, so I had to try it ...

This message is posted through Konqueror running in Knoppix running in Parallels on my Mac.

The whole thing was completely uneventful. It takes about 15 seconds of accepting defaults to create a new VM in parallels, then an old Knoppix 3.8 disk that I had lying around booted without incident.

Mouse motion is a bit jerky. Keyboard response is fine.