Late Tuesday night, I was playing an old game on my Dell laptop, and the machine froze up — nothing worked. It was the first time that had happened since the motherboard was replaced more than a year ago. Rebooting it led to strange errors, so I shut it down and went to bed.
Wednesday morning, I got up and booted it up again, and it worked fine — for a while. Then it froze up again, and got strange errors on reboot. That’s pretty conclusively a heat problem. I checked, and my three-year warranty ran out a month ago (of course), so I was on my own. No problem, I’m a trained electronics technician! The last heat problem that I had on that machine was due to a huge dust clog covering the inside of the output fan, so I shut it down, disconnected the power cord and battery, and opened it up.
Hm, no dust clog this time.
I put it back together, being very careful to get everything just the way it was.
- It wouldn’t boot at all.
-(
Nothing I could do would bring it back to life. After several hours of fruitless attempts at revival, I finally had to face the fact that it was dead. Well, it had a good run. But my programming work requires a computer, and none of [the other working ones that I have][1] are powerful enough to get anything done on (ever try to run Windows XP through VMware 6 on a medium-powered laptop computer circa 2003? I don’t recommend it, you’ll die of old age before the virtual machine finishes booting), so it was time to go shopping.
Perusing the local Best Buy’s computer section, I found a machine that was comparable to the dearly-departed Dell (and a lot cheaper today than the Dell was three years ago, let me tell you!). But as I was going to pay for it, I asked the clerk who was helping me if they had an Internet-connected system so I could make sure that the latest version of Ubuntu Linux supported all its hardware. To my shock and amazement, he knew exactly what I was talking about, and even knew that everything would work out of the box except the sound, which would require manually compiling a new version of the ALSA driver. I’d long ago given up hope of ever finding a computer store clerk who knew anything about computers.
Then he explained that he ran Linux himself, and suggested a different machine, one I hadn’t even considered. After checking out its specs and thinking it over, I took his advice.
Ploni, you’re going to laugh… I bought a MacBook Pro. 4GB of memory, 13.3″ screen, aluminum unibody. Hardware revision “5,5” (which apparently means it’s the latest one, just released a couple months ago). I can’t tell what size hard drive it has, it seems larger than a 250GB but not as large as a 320GB… whatever, it should be sufficient.
I’ve never owned a Mac before. I haven’t even used one since the summer of 1986, when I borrowed one for a few days. I have to admit, I’m kind of impressed with the hardware… I’ve had a router that supports 802.11n and gigabit ethernet for over a year, but this is the first computer I’ve had with either, and they’re impressively fast. It has no problem with my wireless mouse (via USB dongle) or my Bluetooth keyboard. And it’s all but silent too, and quite thin compared to any of my previous notebook systems. And the expected battery life… seven hours! Sheesh! It even puts the five-hour extended battery on my Dell to shame, and that’s the best one I’ve ever seen before this!
The OS is frustrating, because just enough is where I expect it to be that the things that aren’t are very confusing. I’m sure I could get used to it with a few days’ effort, but that will have to wait, I have real work to do first. As soon as I figured out how to call up the web browser I looked up [the instructions for installing Ubuntu Linux on it][2].
The install wasn’t difficult. The only real problem was getting the sound system to work, which I did via the instructions on [this page][3]. After that, it was just a matter of reinstalling a few programs and getting the data from my latest backup. I can now boot into either Mac OS X or Ubuntu Linux with no problem (I decided against putting Windows on it too, for now — I can do almost everything I need Windows for through VMware). Some things seem noticeably slower (starting Firefox for the first time in a session, for instance), but overall it seems faster than the Dell… probably because, as I just discovered, it’s using a processor that’s 25% faster.
Apparently I picked up the wrong external monitor adapter, but as soon as I take that back and get the right one, I should be fully back in business. 🙂
Wow! I never thought I’d see the day when you’d become a Mac user. Very cool!
You still haven’t — I’m still a Linux user. I’m just running it on Mac hardware, because it was the best thing I could find for it. 🙂 But yes, I’ll probably poke around OS X eventually, now that it’s available to me.
One door this does open for you is that now you’re able to write your own custom iPod Touch apps! Even if you never make them public, I could definitely see you pimping your iPod. 🙂
Yes, that thought did cross my mind while pondering the purchase. 🙂
Cool! Welcome to Macintosh! One thing though, it’s really a much better idea to run Linux in VMWare Fusion rather than booting it up into the bare metal as I think you’re doing. Linux doesn’t support SMC, the proprietary voltage-regulation/fan/etc system of the Mac, very well – I often hear of “death by Ubuntu” due to Mac laptops, that aren’t very good at dissipating heat compared to PCs, overheating under load in a dual-boot Linux system. You’ll find that running VMWare Fusion (and to a lesser extent, Virtual Box) full screen has almost identical performance to running it dual-boot on a Mac with modern intel processors as all of them have. You’ll also find, as I think I mentioned before, VMWare Fusion to be very inexpensive. (Virtual Box is free of course, but I think you’ll find VMWare to be worth the purchase for you since you’ll need to be able to compile and such as fast as possible.)
I’d installed the SMC support under Linux, and proved that it worked (i.e. the system wouldn’t overheat no matter what I threw at it). But I was only getting a couple hours of run-time off of the battery in Linux, rather than anything near the seven hours that it was supposed to have. So I took your advice and bought VMware Fusion this morning.
I’ve got my Ubuntu virtual machine up and running now, but I think I’m going to have to repartition the system again before I can get it right. 🙁 Still looking into how to do it.
Hmm, maybe SMC support has improved. At any rate, running a VM full screen is basically the same nowadays unless you really need exploding windows and Quake 4 to perform well in Linux. 😉 You can repartition a Mac system live, in case you didn’t know, without booting a CD. Though I recommend closing all other programs while you do it, and logging in with the “shift” key pressed to disable all start up items, not because it’ll corrupt the file system, but because they could lock a file and then the repartitioning system will quit before it gets the job done – which can be dangerous. Disk Utility is on the OS or install disks, and I think also can repartition while running it off a CD or USB key image of your OS/install disk. Too bad if you’re installing or removing boot camp, you have to repartition while logged in, though I never had a problem once I stopped running other programs at the same time. 🙂
Yes, I discovered the live repartitioning system, and used it to set up my first attempt at installing Ubuntu. Then I used it again to remove it. 🙂 Impressive.
No need for Quake 4 or Compiz, so it should be fine this way. And the battery life is definitely better… between five and ten (!!) hours now. 😀