MCAndre

Ubuntu 7.10 is good stuff. The new version is faster, more stable, polished, and even a little too sparkly. There’s a burn animation for tooltips!

Getting my Mac ready for the install was easy. Leonardo pointed out Ubuntu’s MacBook guide, which is very helpful. I used rEFIt as a boot manager. It’s graphical and already has icons for Mac OS, Windows, and Linux. To install that, I just ran the DMG.

After that, GParted was able to steal some gigs from my Mac partition to make room for Linux. That part actually took a couple hours, so don’t be surprised if the screen doesn’t change for quite a while. After chopping up the hard drive, I was still able to successfully boot back into Mac OS, and nothing was missing or corrupted.

The live CD is a fully functional version of Ubuntu that runs straight from the CD drive–no modifications are made to the hard drive until you decide to install it.

During the installation process I chose to install onto the “largest continuous free space.” This is the space left over from partitioning with GParted. After a reboot, my Mac partition is still great and I can now boot Ubuntu Linux.

The few things that didn’t work correctly had tutorials for fixing:

• double tap and two finger right click on trackpad
• wireless card–Leonardo also pointed out that madwifi is the way to go for some AirPort cards.
• speaker volume
• installing Ruby gems
• vi arrow keys
• reading private files from my Mac partition
• Greasemonkey for Firefox
• No hot corners? Use brightside.

A good place to start looking if you have any problems is the Community Ubuntu Documentation.

MP3s and other audio/video formats may not legally be included with Ubuntu. Therefore, you must install codecs (via the documentation) and for Real media (*.rm, *.ram, etc.) I had to install RealPlayer.

I ended up picking the Crux theme:

It’s cool. For games I chose AssaultCube and Wormux. Hey, Wormux developers! I found a bug. If you eliminate all but one guy on each team, then use one of them to kamikaze the other, the game doesn’t end in a draw. It hangs.

There’s a free equivalent to many non-free programs you use. Some are available for Windows and Macintosh. Find them or roll your own, that’s the Linux way.

Update: I now have a dock, kind of like Mac’s: the Avant Window Navigator.

Its animations are slow and the icons lose their sharpness for some reason, but some cool applets for it will become available soon.

I once dimmed my screen. Although I have since brightened my screen, every time I restart Ubuntu, my brightness level is reset to the lowest one. Bug report here.

Yes, vi and emacs are good. I do prefer a GUI, though. gedit does fine. I can’t say the same for Scribes, since Scribes has one window for every open file. Kate is fine, but only has one look, and like many of these editors, can’t open up a folder recursively. Even when they do, they try to open up files in the hidden .svn folder. It’s so easy to do this the smart way. I’m sticking to gedit for the time being.

Gah, mouse all over the place! Ubuntu doesn’t fine tune the mouse like Mac OS does. Every third word doesn’t appear correctly in my blog editor. A brush of touchpad can send the cursor to Mars or scroll down. The disable-trackpad-for-two-seconds-after-each-key-press trick does not really fix this problem.

Note: The WordPress editor doesn’t perform Undo correctly in Firefox on Ubuntu. I had three more screenshots in this post that were deleted when Control+Z caused all of them to disappear, and Redo did nothing. I don’t know who to blame on this one.

Again, there’s a problem with running Digital Paintball on anything but Windows. Yes, there is a Qudos installer. It needs to update to build019 already. And dang it, I’m a noob at compiling full-fledged applications for Mac OS. Someone needs to donate a MacBook to the dev team with specific instructions. “This device is to be used only for developing Digital Paintball for Macintosh computers.”

One more thing: Screenshot doesn’t include the window border when CompizBeryl flashy animations are running.

This just in: It looks like the Samba problems have cleared up! Now they install.

I love my MacBook.

Google Desktop is available for Macs. That’s great, but why would I use it when Spotlight is the greatest thing since Sliced Bread.app? The one additional search item on display at the website is Google Mail. Cool. Those who find it an addition to ⌘+Space, good for you! Honestly, even if the Google Desktop widgets never compare to Dashboard, I believe this is another win for multiple platform support.

I have used a MacBook for over a week. From Windows to Linux to Macintosh, I have learned a few lessons.

Anyone can use Windows, Linux, and Mac. The interface is the same: A desktop with files, folders, launchers, and a wallpaper. Applications use windows. Tools like Launchy, Deskbar, and Quicksilver can find files and programs. Yahoo widgets, GDesklets, and the Dashboard are pretty much the same. The major browsers (Internet Exploder, Firefox, AOL, Safari) function alike, even if some have more flair than others.

Mac heads game, too. The first game I have installed is Halo. It works fine. Soon I plan to take a trip to Best Buy and get a solid FPS for Macs, like Star Wars Battlefront or Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six. Two of my friends are trying to WoW me. My favorite free game is still Digital Paintball, which works in Windows and Linux. Wormux even has a live CD, the perfect LAN party tool.

Windows is stale. The search dog needs to be put down, while Spotlight takes center stage. The graphical experience of a Mac is amazing. Windows is ugly, stupid, and bug-ridden. Want to join a secured wireless network? The windows wireless network viewer is slow and requires protocol specifications that no average user would understand. TKIP? WEP? 128 or 64 bits? I joined a friend’s WiFi on my Mac. The type of encryption was already given. I just needed to enter the password. No hexadecimals required. Third party apps for Mac are very cool. MacSaber, iAlarm, Virtue Desktops. Heck, the first party apps are neat as well. Macs come with Garage band. Free. TextEdit is fully functional, whereas Notepad has only one undo. The Linux community is cloning Mac features like the desktop cube faster than Microsoft, and innovating like nothing else. You can search not only files and folders, but IM conversations. Bookmarks. Contacts. Google Desktop, step up to the challenge: port to Linux and Mac.

You get what you pay for. When you pay $300 for an eMachine with Windows XP, you don’t get a VGA slot. Alienware is the exception. My Sentia laptop cost $2000 and burned itself out in a year. My MacBook cost $1100 and already I’m noticing the little things. The keyboard keys that aren’t made small or cheap. The iSight built in. The ports all on the left side. The brilliant AC adapter that can attach to a longer cord and doesn’t require a hot, heavy brick to hang off the edge of the table. I have found a balance between numbingly stable and newly smelted software: Mac OS X. Unix based, of course.

I am blogging on my new MacBook.