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Flirting With Mac OS X
An anonymous reader wrote to us with an article on Byte from Moshe Bar about flirting with using OS X. Taco and I are both strongly considering beginning to use OS X as a primary laptops - anyone else looking at doing this? And anyone from Apple that can get me a good price on super TiBooks? *grin*
...if I was given a "review unit" with it on.
As it is I'll happily continue with my Thinkpad 600 running Debian, XFce and Rox filer. I bet mine with its PII 266 is more responsive than his, too!
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
if they can write a new GUI for Unix, then why they hell can't they support two or 3 mouse buttons if you want them?
I recently inherited a G4 and have installed Jaguar (10.2, now 10.2.1) on it. So, I'll make just a few points.
- I don't have to worry about rebuilding my kernel everytime I add some device that I didn't
anticipate the last time I rebuilt my kernel.
- The UI is a bit tough to get used to (I know
I could put in a more familiar WM, but I want to give this a change), but it is very very nice
in many respects. But it ain't X, and I've got lots of old habits.
- fink is a must (as others have already pointed out). People are busy porting and packaging the stuff that I know and use to OS X. Fink is how to manage it.
- Administration can be a problem if you don't know what controls what. For example, some files in
/etc really should only be edited by using the
System Preferences GUI, while others can be modified by vi. Learning which is which takes some poking around. But this is true of any distro which provides high level tools for adminstration.
- Basically everything works. I don't have to fiddle with things to make the system usable.
My Linux system still remains my primary system for many things, put that is shifting function by function. (The single biggest limit is that I don't have proper air conditioning in the room where most of my boxes sit and I don't like leaving the G4 running all the time, until the weather cools down here.)Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Uh.. you do know it supports multi button mice right? Just plug one in, you get context menus, etc. on right click..
And there is a defined list of standard key substitutions for menu items as well, stuff that is application dependent is generally variant.
Just FYI.
First of all there is no such thing as a "windows laptop", because X86 can run a variety of operating systems. My PC laptop is a Fujitsu P-2000 and I currently get 7 hours of battery life running Linux on the extended battery. If I take out my media drive and but in the secondary battery I can get 14 hours of battery life.
The brand new powerbook G4 I got from work is lucky if it sees 4 hours.
At my previous job I used three different IBM ThinkPads. These are great, even if they are expensive as hell and very very heavy. But they worked fine.
:-)
At my new job (I am employee #9 on a 11-person company) everybody has macs except me. Since I am the web developer and the code is in asp I inherited two Windows 2000 boxes. I had been dying to switch to mac since January, and this was the last excuse I needed to make the jump.
I got a killer deal for an iBook 600 with 256MB RAM (already upped to 384), airport and MS Office v:X retail. The whole bundle cost me less than a retail iBook 700 with 128MB of ram and no airport.
I am very happy with OS 10.2 and I have been able to do all my ASP work with just BBEdit Pro and the MS Remote Desktop client. I can manage my freeBSD and Linux servers thru the terminal without any theatrics. My friends that used to make fun of me for even considering the mac are now changing their minds when they see how easy it has been for me to make the switch. Plus the iBook is so light I don't feel it on my backpack.
I am of course counting down the days for when I can afford to get a Titanium Powerbook
Pedro
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The Insomniac Coder