A Day Late

I finally got around to buying Panther this week. The upgrade went smooth as can be, although I did notice my Emacs for Aqua isn’t working anymore, I’ll have to look at that. I really haven’t noticed a whole lot of differences, but the stuff I have noticed is good. I love the Expose. Open window management was always something that bugged me about OS X. I usually have quite a few windows open and switching between them was cumbersome sometimes. The F9 key works nicely. I wonder if it’d be possible to create a hotkey on the status bar to activate expose instead?

One thing I wish Apple would implement is a virtual desktop switching tool. That’s one thing I love about my Red Hat machine, the virtual desktops. There’s an open source tool available at sourceforge, but it doesn’t seem to work with Panther properly. Anyway, I think it’d be a nice addition and I’m a little surprised Apple hasn’t already implemented it.

Anyway, so far I’m happy with the upgrade.

The new powerbooks are out. I thought they’d introduce them before the school year started but oh well. Should I upgrade or should I just be content with the nice system I have now? I have to admit, I’m a sucker for always wanting/getting “the latest and greatest.” Honestly the new system isn’t much better than the one I have now. There’s upgrades to USB 2.0, Firewire 800, 802.11g, 1.25 ghz processors, 80 GB harddrive, integrated bluetooth, etc. Honestly the thing I like most about the new powerbooks is the stylish new back lit metallic keyboard. It just looks slick and I have to admit, I really like it and want it. Fortunately I think reason will prevail and I’ll stick with the machine I have now for a while. That won’t stop me from seeing how much I could sell it for on eBay so I can calculate how much a new system would really cost. Who knows, maybe the bookstore will have another nice discount on the powerbooks (I doubt it).

I noticed a slashdot article for a Gentoo “live” cd to run linux on Mac’s, the other day. It took me a few days, but I finally got around to trying it out. I downloaded the Gentoo Gnome CD image last night on my cable modem at home and it downloaded pretty quick, around 2 or 2 1/2 hours I’d guess.

The CD is bootable so once I burned the image to a disc I rebooted my powerbook, held down the “c” key and Gentoo started booting right up. I really haven’t had enough time to play around with it much. I just ran through it fairly quickly trying to see what’s available and how it looked. From what I’ve seen I’m impressed. Gentoo also has a screenshot from the KDE version that’s also running mac-on-linux which looks pretty slick. This allows you to run OS X inside linux. I’m interested to see how it performs or if there’s any limitations. I also noticed Gentoo had a posting on their homepage about releasing a full version of Gentoo for the PowerPC platform. Looks like linux on a Mac is already here. I honestly thought it would take a lot longer than this. By the way, I REALLY dislike websites that don’t make permanent links to posts on their homepage obvious. I spent a while trying to figure out how to link to both posts but couldn’t find much, so you’ll just have to be satisfied with the link to the home page. Maybe in the next few weeks when the posts drop from the homepage and become archived I’ll come back and update this.

CORRECTION: After looking at Gentoo’s site a little more I realized they already have a distribution for PowerPC. The post I was looking at was for a distribution that would run under OS X. That’s even better than before. According to the post it should be “released soon” (I wish someone would define soon).

I mentioned that my post yesterday was a milestone. It was my first post from my new Powerbook G4. I’ve been hesitating for months and I finally decided to break down and get it last Friday. It’s awesome, what more can I say? I’m still having a good time finding different features, organizing my MP3’s, etc. The things I love about it the most are the things I wanted in the first place (which is good). Mainly, portability and battery life without sacrificing performance. I decided to go with the 15″ model and I love how thin and light it is. I can easily drop it in the document bag I take to work and not even notice it. My Dell C800 on the other hand made me feel like I was carrying around a bag of bricks. The battery life has been great. I burned some DVD’s the other day and the battery lasted about 3 hours, which was better than I expected.

Don’t get me wrong, life is not perfect with the Powerbook but it’s better than I expected. A few things I’ve run into that have irked me. One is Quicken for Mac. I got a good deal on it a few months ago and anticipating getting the powerbook, I purchased it. I loaded it on the other night and was getting ready to transfer my data from my dell laptop when I noticed that the Mac version doesn’t have the 401(k) account type. This wouldn’t be a big deal but tracking my 401(k) is one of the things I REALLY liked about quicken. I’m still trying to decide what to do about it. I hate to keep my other laptop around just to balance my 401(k) but I may.

Another concern I have is my iPaq (something I was already anticipating). I really like my iPaq, esspecially because it allows me to keep my calendar, contacts, etc synchronized between my work computer and my home laptop. Right now I’m just hoping Microsoft is planning on putting out a Mac version of ActiveSync but I haven’t been able to find any information that they’re going to.

“Mac’s never crash.” Umm…yeah, I can’t agree with that. The first day I had it, it crashed a few times. I was trying to copy some files from my dell laptop to the powerbook. Both laptops were using a netgear wireless access point. I’m guessing that the load was just too much on the access point and it would reset because I would lose connection on both machines briefly. The windows machine would readily reset and give an error on the file transfer. The powerbook would lock up completely. I tried “relaunching” the “finder” without success. The system was completely unresponsive and the only thing I could do was hold down the power button and reboot the machine (not a good thing to have to do). I think recovery from a connection loss during a file transfer ought to be recoverable, or I should at least be able to kill the process without having to reboot.

But, overall I have to say I’m really happy with the purchase. I was planning on waiting until the “new” 15″ models came out with the updated hardware. I thought that would be in April but no luck there. I’m guessing it will at least be until September or January. I got a VERY good deal on this powerbook model so I decided the discount was worth it and I don’t regret it (I may if the new models come out next week, but not right now ). Anyway, I’m sure they’ll be more post on my Powerbook in the days/months to come (for better or worse).