My GAANN fellowship provides me with a laptop, and that laptop has finally arrived. It's a MacBook 13" and it's very nice. Unfortunately the University claims it as its own because it was bought through them and was over $1k, so I will have to give it back when my GAANN stint is over. Hopefully that means when I graduate, but if our department doesn't get the GAANN award that it's applying for that means GAANN is kaput next August. So I'm keeping the iBook in cold storage and we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

In the process of setting up my essential applications I discovered a few had been updated without telling me, and I took the chance to investigate some alternatives to the programs I wasn't fully satisfied with. iTerm was updated, and actually has a useful release now. It looks a little nicer, seems to behave better, although I've come across some glitches when it's set to always show tabs. I skipped the space-consuming menu bar system monitoring stuff that I had on the iBook and gave iPulse another look. Last time I was turned off by the clown colors and that it was hard to see what was going on. This time I was looking for succinctness and was willing to invest some time in learning to read the display, and I tried out a few of its jackets (I settled on Doppler), and I'm quite pleased. It also has a menubar display that's much more relevant and compact than what I was using, as well as an animated dock icon. And it doubles as an analog clock down there in the corner. I'm very impressed.

I am disappointed, however, in the video card. Flightgear still runs at a crawling 7fps sitting on the runway at KSFO with the default settings. I might be able to get it running at a suitable speed, but based on this experience this Intel GMA 950 card is nothing like the NVidia Quadro4 in my desktop. Flightgear on the iBook worked fairly well in Linux, so I'll try that out when I get Linux installed and perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised. This wasn't to be my primary Flightgear station anyway so it's not the end of the world.

I'll report on installing Ubuntu 6.10 when I get around to it in the next few days.