MacBook Unibody – Have I betrayed Linux?

One day, it had to come. Continuous proublems with VMware after kernel updates, time consuming and tiring mounting, and politics of „what you don't do yourself, you will never have“ forced me to reconsider my attitude to the free software. Yeah – I betrayed my IBM, which patiently served me since my teenage, Debian and Fluxbox and payed a vast amount of money to one of the most evil corporations ever. On the other hand, I got a really lovely and witty plaything!

„The Toy“ also has some drawbacks. The resolution is not as good as it could've been – Lenovo uses 1440×900 at screen of the same size --, and also the time response of the display is worse than on my old IBM, even though the colours are much better. So, playing Unreal Tournament turned up not to be very easy. Funny thing about the display is the fact, that it is used as a flash when taking pictures with the webcam – it will illuminate all white with the highest contrast so that your face get completely flashed!

There is a lot of keys, that is normal PC user used to. However, I recommend using Key Remap 4 MacBook and No Eject Delay to remap the Eject key to Forward Delete as the ejecting can be done very intuitively in Finder or PathFinder as well as unmounting. I also recommend using Ukelele to create custom keyboard layouts – finally I can get all those weird french accents to my Czech Qwerty keyboard – I had never managed to achieve that before neither on Windows, nor on Linux as I was just too lazy to spent hours examining XML files.

Moving windows around between spaces

The thing that one will notice very quickly – it makes people lazy. One will find out, that nearly everything can be done by the huge touchpad – from switching windows and desktops by exposé to resizing documents, copying and pasting. When using Linux I was really proud of using my GUI just by keyboard. Now, I don't know why – now I even feel bothered when having to touch the keyboard, which is by the way very comfortable to write on. As I bought the cheapest model, my keyboard letters are not illuminated, which is maybe better as the Apple Business department messed it completely up so that I got French Azerty keyboard, even though I requested US. In the end I was so tired of discussing it, so I just kept it – writing without looking at it – anyway, I would prefer not to have any symbols written on the keyboard as it would be even more „cool“!

One of my friends referred to this silvery thingie as a coffee machine – and yes, it really is one! Everything just works and one doesn't need to be bothered by any settings and getting angry by things which does not work. The system really tries to implement everything – there is even an FTP and Apache server in-a-box and very easily configurable! I am just a little bit surprised how many people think that buying a Mac is one of the most stupid ideas. Dunno whether they really touched one or not, or whether they are just jealous… On the other hand, I would appreciate native support for NTFS and EXT3 – one must have to do something to achieve it.

My widgets

What I really find useful are widgets. The best one is the Web clip widget – it can cut parts even from secured webpages – so for instance, I can easily see any new comments in my blog admin page or I can see any new notes from my teachers at our university information system.

My opera skin, to be downloaded here

All the things used on Linux are available or there are special OSX version – to name MacVIM, SSHfs, Mencoder. Linux users might fancy Fink which uses Debian package system to provide you not a small amount of compiled linux applications for OSX. Window users might fancy http://darwine.sourceforge.net/ for running Windows applications. Noone will prevent me of using StarCalc.

Use Quicksilver to save your time – let it run automatically and use it by keystrokes