MacBook

Michael Dale

Well the MacBook is finally out. I'm contemplating getting one. Also I've noticed that my last post broke IE and really anyone running sub 1600x1050. Sorry about that, go buy a bigger screen ;) On another note, I got an email from one of my friends at usyd:

Sydney Uni is selling original iMacs for $50!!! I don't know if you have any use for super cheap old computers, but I thought I'd tell you anyway. The School of Languages is trying to get rid of them. Maybe for spare parts, extra storage space (although the one I saw I had a hard drive of a whopping 4 GB - not much storage space there!)???? Anyway, I thought you might like to know.

So if anyone wants cheap macs. I think I've got enough. On last count we now have 6 macs in the house :)

To the mac cave

Michael Dale

Shamelessly ripped from the latest Atomic Mag

Apple moving to Intel based CPUs

Michael Dale

It's tru_e! So anyway, it is official. Apple is moving to Int_el based CPUs, replacing the IBM G5 and the Motorola G4. So here is a quick run down of what is happening:

• First Apple computer with an Intel CPU by this time next year
• Majority of the transition within 2 years
• Developer Kits running a Pentium 4 3.6GHz PowerMac are available to developers NOW for $US999 and must be returned in 2007 (Ships with 10.4.1)
• Every operating system since OS 10.0.0 has worked internally on Intel CPUs
• Most Mac applications will work on the new CPU via a layer called "Rosetta"
• New version of Xcode (2.1) out now will compile for Intel CPUs
• Apple is not dropping support for the PowerPC
• There is nothing stopping the new Macs from running Windows, but OS X will not run on a standard PC.

Hopefully we'll see Pentium-M Laptops and NOT Celeron ibooks/imacs

Ubuntu on PPC

Michael Dale

I decided to give Linux a shot again. I’ve never been a huge fan. Personally I feel much happier with BSD, but UNI runs Fedora Core 3 on most of the FIT computers so I felt I should give it a try again.

This time I didn’t feel like screwing around with installing Linux on my Athlon so I downloaded the live boot disc of Ubuntu version 5.04 for PPC (PowerPC) and booted it on my 12” 1.2GHz iBook.

To boot off a cdrom on the mac you need to hold down “c” as the system boots.

So anyway I’ve been using Ubuntu on my iBook for about 30 minutes and I thought I’d get down my first thoughts (I’ll probably write something more in detail later).

The system booted fairly quickly (remembering this is off a CD) and the first thing I noticed when Gnome (the default window manager for Ubuntu) appeared was that the mouse moved really quickly! Now when I say really quickly, I mean normal speed. Mac users take things slowly, so it was fast for ME!

Anyway the first test was network connectivity through the wireless card. Now I wasn’t really expecting it to work, considering it is a mac and all. Well it didn’t; no wireless. Aww. There is a good post about why it doesn't work here.

So I plugged in a network cable and turned on my network card and picked up an address via DHCP. Fired up firefox, working internet. Easy.

I then loaded “Music Player” and the first thing I noticed was that it seemed to support the iPod. So I plugged in my apple formatted iPod via firewire. Well it worked. The drive mounted and I could read all my music and files. Cool.

Only problem was that there is no MP3 support built in (or AAC for that mater). Oh well, not that hard to install.

apt-get couldn’t find some PPC binaries towards the end of the install but that didn’t really seem to break anything. MP3s now work, although the sound is really soft (and it is turned up to maximum).

I then decided to put the thing to sleep. The iBook quite happily went to sleep. So I went off to dinner. When I came back the laptop was still sleeping (good thing) so I opened it, bad idea. I got a blast of sound through the speakers, it didn’t stop. I quickly reset it (and no I didn't need to take the exploding iBattery out). Pity. There is a bit of information about it here So I restarted back into Ubuntu to have a last play.

It is a bit hard to work with one button in Ubuntu; probably could bind the keys to something else, haven’t really looked.

Also the laptop seems to be working pretty hard. The fan does come on, which doesn’t happen much at all in OS X.

A part from those issues, it is fairly usable. The system runs really fast. I’m impressed. Video seems to work okay (the iBook has an ATi Radeon 9200, ATi aren’t known for their great linux support). I haven’t tried any 3D a part from the screen saver.

So final thoughts?

Would I use it?

No, not just yet. Lack of wireless and sleep support really make it hard to use for what I do. But saying that, I am impressed with the system. I wasn’t expecting much out of a mac version of linux, but it runs fine.

Hopefully in the future we’ll see better support for the mac hardware.

If I had an older mac that couldn’t run OS X then I’d probably seriously look at Ubuntu.

I think I could get to like Ubuntu, no wait I already like it. I’ll defiantly look at putting it on my PC which should have better support for everything.

Now there are probably ways around the problems I had, but I didn’t look all that hard into it. I did notice that the update system showed a new kernel version (not much use on a live CD) which might fix some stuff. But at the moment I’ll have to leave it.

File copying, from OS X to Windows

Michael Dale

If I get time tomorrow I am going to purchase tiger. So I decided to do a backup of my Mac to my Windows 2003 file server.

I have Windows sharing turned on for the Mac and am copying the files from the Windows system.

Currently the Mac cannot access Windows shares on a Server 2003 system because of the authentication used, I’m hoping tigers adds support for this. (Note that a Mac works happily with every other Windows OS).

There were a few problems copying files, mainly to do with permissions and the simple fact that the Mac file system (HFS+ if I remember correctly) is much more advanced than NTFS.

Although there were a few problems I was impressed with the way Windows handled the errors (of course Samba on the Mac translated most of the file structure differences into something Windows understands).

Permissions of the current user do not have access to the file (above).

Unable to copy a symlink

Locked file

General Permissions.

Advanced Permissions

OSX Tiger Gold Master

Michael Dale

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger build declared gold master I can not wait!

The case of the crashing iPod

Michael Dale

I’ve got a Generation 4 20gb iPod that I’ve had since late last year. It is a pretty cool device and is built well. But I always had the problem of it crashing on me once or twice a week. Worse than my Windows box! Now I also used to charge it via Firewire on either the PC or the Mac laptop. But anyway a few months ago I decided to setup my dock for it properly. I didn’t want to have to turn the computer on to listen to music. So I decided to play everything through my iPod. The dock is connect via the lineout to my amplifier and also connected to the 240v AC to Firewire power converter. Since I’ve been charging my iPod through the mains power it hasn’t crashed since. It’s the same Firewire cable as I used to charge with on the computer. I also charged the thing on two different computers. So for some very odd reason, the iPod crashes every now and then if you don’t charge it at least once a week through mains power. So now my iPod is as stable as my Mac. Cool.

Entourage 2004 [added screen shot]

Michael Dale

I was looking a purchasing Office 2004 for Mac as I would like Word and Entourage (email client). I mainly need Entourage 2004 as it can connect to Exchange servers (the older versions can't). Anyway today I work I was handed a copy of Entourage 2004, they have a site license for it here. Cool! So I'm going to install it and see how I like it. Hopefully it's good. I'm looking forward to it! Pity it didn't come with Word :p [ADDED] Now here is a screen shot of the program http://www.bluetrait.com/images/Entourage.jpg

Mac mini

Michael Dale

Apple released a low-end headless Mac, the Mac Mini. The newest Mac offers the following features: 1.25GHz G4 or 1.4GHz G4 for $US499 (listed at $AU799) or $US599 (listed at $AU949) 6.5 inches wide and 2 inches tall 2.9 pounds Up to 1GB of Memory supported (comes with 256MB) ATI Radeon 9200 iLife '05 Keyboard, Mouse, and Monitor sold seperately It can be found on the apple site here: http://www.apple.com/macmini/ They have also released the ipod shuffle, a flash based mp3 player. Found here: http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/ The Mac mini looks pretty sexy, and I know of a friend who really wants one. I might look at getting on too. Although it isn't any faster than my ibook. Still it is a very small sexy little computer. These things will also run linux and other unix operating systems. Quite a few people are looking to turn these things into mini servers.

Thoughts on the new mac. [now with screen shots]

Michael Dale

Well I got my mac yesterday, about a week before I was expecting it so it was in time for Christmas, excellent. This is the first mac I have owned so it has been a bit of a learning experience. As I’ve said many times before I decided to purchase an ibook 12”. I wanted a small laptop that I could move around without any problems. Everyone I talked to said that a 12” laptop would be the best thing to do. I didn’t get a powerbook for a few reasons. Firstly a new model is thought to be out in the next few months and most people don’t recommend you get the current model as it is getting a bit old. Although it is still great. Secondly the ibook is a lot cheaper, about $600. And finally the battery life is much better in the ibook (5.5hours vs 3.5). This model ibook has only been out for about a month here in Australia too, so it is nice and new. The ibook comes standard with 256mb ram but everyone said that OS X really needed at least 512, I got a good deal on ram and added an extra 512mb (now 768) so that is nice. Anyway I booted up the ibook for the first time and was greeted with a setup wizard. All pretty standard stuff, although it was a bit longer than a normal Windows one. Here I setup my user account and Wireless internet connection. Straight away the wireless connection worked, that was a good sign. Anyway it logged in (very quickly might I add) and told me about some software updates for the OS and the Wireless. So I downloaded 150mb of patches. Then I did something wrong and cancelled the whole thing! damn. Anyway I redid the download with no problems. So I am now running OS X 1.3.7. The first thing to check out was internet access. The mac comes with Safari as its standard browser. It has tabs and seems to work nicely. Although it uses KHTML and not Gecko as its rendering engine. It doesn’t make stuff look as good as Firefox although it is still a nice browser (I’ll talk about IE in a sec). So off to download Firefox. I downloaded some .bin file and opened it. The file mounted itself as a hard drive and I could run firefox straight away, no install or anything. Odd. It seemed to work fine but I wanted to INSTALL it! So you just end up dragging the firefox icon out of the .bin file to your computer. Some programs do come with an installer, others don’t. I’m still getting used to that. Now for IE. The mac came with IE 5.2 installed. Now when I think of IE 5 (or any version) I think yuck. But no! IE on the mac is good. It renders stuff almost the same as Firefox, holy crap! IE on mac is better than IE on Windows! DAMN. But there is no tabs so back to Safari and Firefox. The funny thing I’m running both Safari and Firefox at the same time, I just switch between the two. Unlike windows changing between apps doesn’t really feel like changing between apps, its just like changing to a different IE window or something. Safari and Firefox just seem to go together. So I’m using both. And now for the seriously cool OS X feature. Expose!! Wow. I love the F9 button! It brings up all your application windows in a minimised size and you can select a program or window just by clicking on it. So much better than alt+tab (although the mac has that too, apple+tab). F11 is like the show desktop button in the quickstart menu on windows. F10 just shows the windows from the program you are currently running. Very cool! I’m really glad I got the ibook, the battery life is great. About 4.5 to 5 hours with the wireless turned on (bluetooth off). Speaking of Wireless, Damn! It is so good. Very fast and I can walk half way down the street without it dropping out. The netgear AP seems to be doing its job very nicely. Oh the suspend on this thing is great. The laptop hasn’t been switched off since I got it. Just close the screen and it goes to sleep, open the screen and it is ready. Michael-Dales-Computer:/ michaeldale$ uptime 17:34 up 1 day, 1:50, 2 users, load averages: 0.16 0.12 0.19 My poor PC hasn’t been switched on since yesterday (after I copied all my music across). The mac does windows shares very nicely too. I installed Remote Desktop Client so I can access my windows server. I can run that in full screen so it feels just like a PC, scary! There are still some things I need to learn about the Mac but I’ll get there. I love it! I just need to get a C compiler for this thing. Anyway I’ll upload some pictures later. Merry Christmas again, have a great day :) [added] Here are some screen shots of my mac. http://blog.dalegroup.net/images/site/mac1.jpg http://blog.dalegroup.net/images/site/mac2.jpg http://blog.dalegroup.net/images/site/mac3.jpg more photos to come later...