The Fugue

I upgraded to Tiger today. The question on everybody's mind is, would I have paid for it? The answer is still probably no, but there are some very important improvements over Panther, at least from my perspective.

First, Dashboard is just as cool as it looks, although not as fast as I'd imagined (there are noticeable delays in e.g. the hula dancer almost every time, and CPU usage is nearly pegged while it's open). Spotlight looks useful, but I'm not yet sure whether the indexing is going to be bad for my battery. More investigation will be needed there.

Tiger has ruby 1.8.2, and unlike Panther's 1.6 it seems to be fully enabled with Tk. (I can't say for sure that that's not because I had installed TkAqua prior to upgrading in an attempt to get Tk working before) The upshot of this is that you can write ruby GUIs that don't require users to do any voodoo, not to mention all the benefits of 1.8 over 1.6.

Some say it's faster. I haven't noticed. If anything it seems slower (and my laptop seems hot). This may be temporary or configurable; more investigation is in order. I do understand that gcc4 does a superb job of optimizing for the platform though.

Last, but not least, Tiger supports remapping CAPS to Control right out of the box.

31 minutes to a default Ubuntu install on the 12" iBook. Everything went smoothly, nothing got hosed. I haven't really looked at what is and isn't supported yet, but I can say that power management is supported to some degree out of the box. More reports to come, then I will probably install Debian before I start using the linux partition in earnest, unless I can figure out a way to mix ubuntu and debian testing that doesn't result in a meltdown. (I have a couple of ideas)

Well it turns out Safari can do tabs, they're just not enabled by default. Safari does some OS X things well enough that I'm using it as my primary browser. It's actually easier to open links in a new tab than Firefox (command-click instead of command-option-click). It looks more OS X-like, although Firefox doesn't look bad either. But the real benefit, at least at this stage of my usage, is that it runs .dmg and so on automatically upon download so I don't have to go fishing for the file I just downloaded. I do miss the status bar, though.

In other news, iTunes almost got rejected flat out because it didn't support ogg vorbis. The best alternative from my quick search (after xmms from fink didn't work out of the box) was something called Audion, which is so far the only program to crash hard on the iBook for me (kill worked wonders, though). It was pretty ugly, to boot, so I got the ogg quicktime component for iTunes. I imagine if I ever do serious long-period listening on the iBook (and I eventually will when I'm at NMSU, I'm sure) then it will probably be back to IMMS and XMMS (or some other compatible media player), because I am wholly addicted to IMMS.

I thought X11 had gone bonkers—I couldn't get it to listen to ~/.Xresources or any variation thereof. It turns out I just needed to install the X11 SDK (which I did along with all the other SDKs), and things worked great. I'm guessing the reason is the same reason xrdb didn't work either: /usr/bin/cpp didn't exist and xrdb failed with a complaint to that effect.

Yes, it can be done, and yes it is beautiful. Actually, Terminus proper is out of the question, but the True Type version of Terminus works great, provided you use it at the appropriate resolutions.

When I sit down with a new computer, I enter the Configuration Zone. Not a distant cousin of the Twilight Zone, it can be a joy or a nightmare. My expectations are generally well-defined, and I tend to get upset when they are difficult to fulfil.

My expectations for a laptop and the OS on it:

• My productivity. This means

  • Web
  • Console
  • ssh
  • IM/IRC
  • Keyboard acceleration

  In Linux, that means Firefox, xterm, ssh (duh), gaim, and currently FVWM. In Windows, it's Firefox, putty, cygwin if I'll be suffering for a prolonged period, gaim, and enough patience to endure the lack of useful keyboard acceleration.

  In OS X:

  • Safari is OK, but there's no tabs so Firefox was one of the first downloads.
  • The terminal is good enough for most of what I use a terminal for. It needs a little tweaking, though. Namely, I need to figure out how to get it to pass the pgup/pgdn keys to the application and not steal them for scrollback, and I need to figure out how to get mutt in screen on falcon to display properly. The font needs serious work, too (I wonder if I can get Terminus to work in OS X).
  • ssh, check.
  • IM: iChat is neat in some ways, but the conversation UI is a terrible waste of space and it doesn't support Jabber. Adium X seems to be what I'll stick with, unless I gravitate to gaim later on, but I was intentionally steering clear of X apps in X11 to try the "OS X" way of doing things.
  • IRC: I usually do this in screen over ssh with irssi, but I did check out irssix and Colluquy. They both look worthy of use as a native IRC client, should I change my habits.
  • Keyboard: I have been quite pleased with the keyboard usage in OS X. I was afraid OS X might be too mousy for me, but the accelerators are consistent and very useful if you take a moment to learn them. I just need to find a quick reference card now. The funky key (command key) is my friend. Thayne tried to tell Jayce^ and I once that you couldn't remap CAPS to ctrl in the Apple laptops, but you can indeed do it with a nifty tool called uControl. One of the most important keystrokes to learn is ctrl-f2, which brings the menu bar into focus.You probably want to switch things so that the function keys are function keys first and nifty laptop feature keys second—the opposite is the default. I also remapped enter to fn, to make the fn versions of the arrow keys easier to access.

• Configurable but usable in default configuration. OS X is very usable, and quite configurable in the important ways. I had fun going through the system preferences, but didn't really change a lot. One thing I wish I could figure out is how to go back to the Show All view with the keyboard.

• Sleep. This has eluded so many laptops I've used it's not even funny—both in Linux and even in Windows. Works great in OS X on this iBook, we'll see about Linux in a week.

• Wireless. This is where I will be disappointed in Linux until I get a usb wireless thingy, but I went into that with my eyes wide open. Works great in OS X, except on boot it doesn't seem to join my network automatically. I'll have to tinker with that.

I ought to mention also that I think a laptop should be light and portable, but that was part of the decision going in and has nothing to do with setup. I am happy with the size of my iBook. Oh, by the way, his name is Gandalf.

I bought a 12" iBook for my upcoming graduate school adventure. I've wanted a Mac for some time now, basically since OS X came out. I can't say yet whether I will like OS X more than Linux or whether I will end up running Linux primarily on it, but I know Apple has good hardware and that linux support for the iBook is purportedly excellent with the exception of the broadcom-chipset Airport Extreme.

I'm going to spend the first week in OS X only, then install Linux. I have used OS X and Mac Classic briefly on other computers, but this is my first time as a Mac user and owner.

I will be chronicling my experience here in perhaps the liveliest flurry of activity this blog will ever see. Sit back and enjoy the ride.