Bluetrait

Got my laptop back. Much quicker than expected!

Looks like they've replaced the keyboard, the whole top of the laptop and the battery! Awesome.

Looks like the battery on my Macbook has died. I'm going to take it in tomorrow to get replaced.

The IPsecuritas website is back online with two new versions (A Universal Version of 2 and a new Beta 3 version).

IPsecuritas is a great free VPN Client for the Mac and is what we use to connect them to our Netscreen VPN.

Unfortunately their website not longer works (is gone?) and it has become hard to get the the software.

I've decided to mirror Version 3b6. This version seems to the latest out. It is a Universal Binary and although in beta, is very stable on my macbook.

Click here to download

My macbook has been running great. Although every now and then it seems to get pretty hot. I check activity monitor to find that both of the cores are running at about 50% load each. Yet no process seems to be taking up anywhere near that much (even combined). I've tracked it down to "Windows Sharing". For some reason, maybe samba has gone crazy or something, but switching off Windows Sharing seems to bring it right back down to a normal temperature. Once you've turned off Windows Sharing you can turn it back on and have no issues. It mainly seems to happen after coming out of sleep. I'll have to try and track down the main reason to the problem. Some software bug somewhere (this is on 10.4.6). I didn't have this problem on my g4 ibook. Although this is really the only problem with my macbook, and it is very minor.

Ordered Monday night, was delivered about 1pm today. Awesome! Cannot wait to get home! ;)

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 :)

Shamelessly ripped from the latest Atomic Mag

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

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.

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