Comments | mdlbear: Shiny!

mdlbear

Shiny!

Jul 18, 2006 21:19

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 ( Read more... )

computers, macbook, work

Comments 18

technoshaman July 19 2006, 04:45:39 UTC

W00t.

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

mdlbear July 19 2006, 05:28:01 UTC

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 July 19 2006, 06:11:12 UTC

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 July 19 2006, 06:30:17 UTC

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!

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technoshaman July 19 2006, 04:46:31 UTC

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

mdlbear July 19 2006, 05:28:55 UTC

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 July 19 2006, 05:13:55 UTC

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 July 19 2006, 05:30:42 UTC

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

randwolf July 19 2006, 06:27:51 UTC

Try an air mouse maybe?

mdlbear July 19 2006, 06:33:07 UTC

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 July 19 2006, 07:04:56 UTC

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 July 19 2006, 15:12:04 UTC

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 July 19 2006, 19:43:44 UTC

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 July 20 2006, 03:41:11 UTC

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 July 20 2006, 05:11:02 UTC

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 ( ... )

Re: Parallels mdlbear July 20 2006, 06:09:29 UTC

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.

Thread 5