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Confessions of a Mac OS X User
An anonymous reader writes "Here's an interesting commentary on OSDir.com about one Mac OS X user's guilt over using it instead of Linux on his laptop, and how he's been burned by the dreaded iBook logic board problems so much that it underlines the tyranny of hardware vendor lock-in: it's not that Mac OS X isn't F/OSS, but that it only runs on Apple hardware. It also raises the obvious question: have you ever felt guilty over using Mac OS X instead of Linux?"
Apple as a company is not an angel. But its not a monoply and is leverging open source an contributing back to the open source community. As a rule Apple shuns DRM (digital rights management).
But OS-X has at its core DARWIN which is an open source version of BSD which apple puts out. The parts of the OS that isn't opensource is the graphics layer above OS and a few other bits (hfs+ the file system is not open either I think.).
They've given back web browser code, updates to GCC etc. etc.. So all told they're not bad guys.
The puritans are running amok outside of reality again.
You mean by flipping the latch on the keyboard, and pulling it back?
It takes 3 minutes to pull the hard drive out -- ya need a phillips head and an allen wrench set. Should be in every geek's toolbag anyways.
Not sure what the problem is. I told the guys from Apple when my screen burned out that I had confidential files and would not be sending the drive with it, and they didn't blink. I called on a Wednesday, got the package to send it out Thursday afternoon, and got my machine back the middle of next week.
Again, not sure what they problem is here...
How is something so blatantly WRONG modded up as interesting? Since when was utter ignorance at all interesting?
Need I go on with how Apple differs from Microsoft and SCO?
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
First of all Apple actually contributes to OSS projects even though they generally stay away from GPLed code and don't have to contribute their changes.
They've made many documented improvements to KHTML, gcc, the *BSDs, and others. They've also made the entire underlying operating system available as OSS.
Can you even come close to saying anything like that about Microsoft and SCO? Those two companies are the ones who testify in from of congress that OSS is unconstitutional and will destroy the US economy.
Apple also doesn't lock down their hardware, and it's totally possible to run other OSes on Macs. Their is one proprietary part that is required to run Mac OS, but if you don't want to run Mac OS it's not a problem.
Ever heard of OpenFirmware? It's an open standard that Apple, Sun and others use instead of the antiquated BIOSes found in PCs. What do MS and Intel want to replace the BIOS with? A locked down firmware that will implement DRM for media and software and possibly even OSes at the most basic hardware level. That's open?
Apple uses standard components and has opened up many of their hardware innovations like FireWire.
In other words: you're nuts.
Are you sure you are talking about a Dual USB ibook, white, 12" screen?
Look at the following picture (and the rest of the instructions). The disk does not sit under the keyboard, and requires the removal of the back of the laptop and many other screws.
I'll second your post.
I seem to make similar posts in Apple threads where iBook logic board discussions arise. I'm a happy owner of a Dual USB 600MHz iBook which has been used for 4 hours or more per day since I bought it nearly two years ago. It's been over the Atlantic three or four times since then and it's travelled all over the UK in my car, on buses and on trains.
It's bombproof, and I still get 2 hours on a full charge even at this age (down from the original 5 or 6 hours when new).
I've never owned a more robust piece of hardware, and that includes my sledgehammer and welding kit.
You sure can... I have no idea what the parent was bumbling on about.
Take a drive out of a PC and put it into another PC - Check.
Take a drive out of a Mac and put it into another Mac - Check.
Both work equaly well. In fact, its even easier on the Mac. You don't even have to take out the drive!! Just hook the two Macs up via Firewire, hold Cmd-T while booting up the Mac with the problem, and have the functional Mac boot from that Firewire drive. If its a drive problem, you've just found it.
The parent has no idea what he's talking about.
I still get 2 hours on a full charge even at this age (down from the original 5 or 6 hours when new).
You probably need to recalibrate your battery.
When I did this with my TiBook, it ran for about 1:45 after the menu bar said it was at 1% power.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
There are already many Linux distributions dedicated/ported to Apple's hardware. Especially there are many Linux installation reports on Apple PowerBooks and iBooks.
Sounds exactly like mine...unfortuantely, I can't read the GeoCities page as its exceeded its limits right now.
Every single Mac Laptop I've had in the last 5 years has worked the exact same way. In the space that you insert the airport card is a little metal cover. Ya unscrew it, pull on the handle provided and lift it off. From there, ya have access to the internal memory -- the stuff they don't want you to upgrade yourself, but won't void your warentee if ya do and beside that, the hard drive.
From my music forums, I've helped a number of people upgrade their drives from the standard 48k RPM (iBook) and 56k RPM (the others) to faster drives...not one had any real problems getting at it.
But again, it sounds exactly like my machine...I haven't opened a G4 iBook yet, but I've heard they were the same as well.
ok I call your ass on the carpet. tell me ONE thing that OSX can do that linux cant.
Easy: Open a complex Microsoft Office document and not lose any layout settings because of conversion issues...
Well that's one. Let me give you a few others:
-Real world page layout (quarkxpress, indesign)
-Photoshop (CMYK) editing
-Real time video editing/post production work of HD streams across ANY IEEE1394 video device.
-Wake up from sleep in less than a second
-Connectivity to a Microsoft Exchange Server
-Actually play Warcraft 3 (and sign up for the worlds of warcraft beta test!) (and no, buying WineX and dealing with the emulation layer isn't good enough)
I can go on and on (like professional MIDI software for musicians) but I just remembered you asked for one thing "OSX can do that linux cant."
Now sure, I can't run it on my Lego Mindstorm, but I think the stuff I listed is a little more important. and with my hardware accelerated X11 server, I can do alot of the stuff that you linux guys can do too.
Let's take this one step further:
Take a drive out of a PC and put it into a Mac - Check.
Sure you can't boot off of the drive without installing a Macintosh operating system but all of the data on the drive will be accessible to the Mac if the drive was formatted with FAT or NTFS. I've done this a number of times to help my PC friends recover data from their crashed PCs and it works without a hitch.
Sure Mac OS is proprietary, but it hardly locks you in to a specific operating system. In fact Mac OS does a damn good job of trying to cooperate with as many other operating systems and file types as possible.
Sapere aude!
This is just ideology run amuck. Programmers and engineers need to eat too. We can't all work for free.
Wake up. Free and Open have little to do with money or salaries or commercial interests. It has to do with rights, freedoms, security, and doing the smart thing for your own company and your clients.
My company runs Linux on all desktops (yes, we're small and nerdy so we can do this) and production servers (just good business, here). We pay money for our operating systems, just like we would to MS or Apple. We happen to pay RedHat and SuSE for our operating systems. We get fantastic support (so far). We make (small) profits here, and we're able to pay our programmers. The RedHat and SuSE people get paid, so they're okay too. Our products save our clients money, so they're doing just well also. What the hell is the problem? Yes, we release nearly all of our own products Open Source, under the GPL. And it doesn't prevent us from charging money to people for them.
If my company goes under, our clients have a lot of piece of mind that the latest source is available to them. Lately, there have even been 3rd party consultants who have taken our source and added features that we simply don't have time for (or disagree with), and they're able to make a living (partially, at least; I'm not sure) at that. Yee ha. There is no lack of money in Free and Open if that's what your goal is.
Dammit, Free and Open are not about money.
i spent an entire year preaching Linux to all my friends but i have to admit that all the way i've been having tons of problems with it... USB devices were not working, attempts to switch keyboard layouts gave me XFree86 errors, trying to do accounting with Gnucash was a lunacy, and could XMMS be ANY UGLIER? Then i tried installing XD2 from Ximian (which I still consider the best "graphical shell" for Linux) and that just broke *everything* on my laptop... On that day i just got so mad i walked down the street and got a powerbook G4...
so, back to the guilt thing.... yes, i do feel guilty - probably because i kind of showed myself as a hypocrite - preaching linux to others then getting an Apple machine. i think the key with Linux happiness is to recognize whether it's APPROPRIATE for what you do. if you need email, web browsers and a shell then Linux IS perfeect... but if you try to use it the way i did (USB, Music, several business applications, multimedia), then you better know how to recompile things yourself (i don't).
Huh? I assume you have found the Terminal application and used it? I am a Sun/Solaris admin and I just replaced my good old Blade 100 with a G5 and nothing really changed for me. There are only four apps that I run constantly from the GUI: Terminal, Mozilla, Mail, and Acrobat. Everything else is done from the command line. You might want to check it out. Almost everything in OSX can be done from the command line. If you need some help to find your way around, check out the "OS X for UNIX geeks" book from O'Reilly.
TECO. A timeline of EMACS variants.
Apple provides a neat little tool named security for this purpose. It allows full access to, and manipulation of, the keychain.
To retrieve my Slashdot password from the keychain, I would do the following:
Note that the first time you use security to access a keychain item, you will receive the standard Confirm Access to Keychain dialog. It would be unwise and unhelpful for this to happen when you are trying to access the keychain remotely via SSH, therefore it would pay to first access the keychain in this manner when you have access to the UI to Always Allow security to access that keychain item.Apple have just implemented an iBook repair program, that among other things will fix any of the stated problems or refund people that have had to pay for the problem.
Say what you like about Apple, but they're willing to stand behind their problems once they recognise a fault (witness the whitespots on the Powerbook G4).
-- james
Well, KDE is a cheesy copy of Windows 2000, and Gnome is ... well, I'm not sure what it is since there are about a billion interfaces to it. Most of the attractive ones look like the designers were a bit too much into Goth, which isn't surprising since Gothic types may be morbid, but at least they're clever.
:-(.
I found it amusing that the Gothic designers would spend hours and hours on beautiful 3D rendering for their almost illegible Gothic fonts, leaving the fonts you actually had to use as unreadable as ever
So you have two type of people working on Gnome/KDE, the types who want to not frighten people by making their system look as much like Windows as humanly possible, and those who do want to frighten people with morbid images! What an unbeatable combination.
(I might sound less bitter if I'd succeeded in getting just one of the Gothic themes to actually work on my Linux PC. I actually like the Gothic types, but I can't resist poking some gentle fun at them).
Anyway, with that setting the stage, you can see how much of a breath of fresh air MacOS X was to me. It's an original interface, that looks lovely and owes debts to nothing save its NeXTian ancestors. The fonts are lovely out of the box; you don't have to install complex X-Windows extensions with elaborate 15 step procedures to make them look ok; you can make 'em look great without any effort whatsoever. You can use great applications like Final Cut Pro and GarageBand, together with Unix stalwarts like emacs and all the command line stuff I know and love.
I don't find MacOS X deficient in command line operation at all. There is emacs (although I wish there was a graphical version that used lovely Cocoa fonts), all my friends tar and ssh and gcc and so on are present and accounted for. It's true that command line administration is a bit obscure, but if you (like me) don't do a lot of administration on your personal computer, that's perfectly fine.
It looks like I echo a lot of MacOS X users, when I note my 10-odd terminal windows and my 10-odd web browser windows. The value of the GUI seems to be primarily in the web browser when I'm doing work. Of course that might be because I develop web sites.
There's definite value in having Unix and Photoshop on the same machine, and that alone makes MacOS X beat Linux and other Unix variants effortlessly.
It's one computer for functions that used to take two or more. Not bad at all.
D