Happy now?
Sunday August 24, 2003 – 12:14 pmI now have Knoppix CDs that actually work, for both the PC and yes, my iBook too. Which I guess answers my question, "Can you run Linux on an iBook?" Yes you can. How cool is that? It didn’t recognize my Airport connection but it was a thrill just to see KDE running on this thing. Maybe another CD-distro will work better… I’ll look around, maybe there’s one tailor-made for the iBook.
So if I have Knoppix CDs, that means of course I went and got a new CD burner today (=yesterday). Jeff, you wanna come see me smash my Iomega now? You can even help, I have an old Click’o'Death zipdrive just for you. Heheh. So, the new one is the cheapest most affordable external I could find, an I/OMagic MagicWriter 4x4x6. It works fine on the Linux machine but unfortunately doesn’t on the iBook, which kinda defeats the purpose of buying an external, but oh well. Maybe one day I’ll put a Linux partition on here and be able to use it that way.
Patrick popped by just before John got home from the airport, so I immediately dragged them both with me to the computer store to look for the CD burner. But not before getting a little mini-lecture from John about how my teeth are more important than burning CDs… I should save that $60 for the dentist!! Yes, I really should, so can we go now? I gave him the puppy-dog sad face and he relented. God, I suck. I’m a horrible person with gnarly teeth, scratched-up glasses, worn-out shoes and only one pair of jeans. But never let it be said that I can’t burn a CD. :-O
While we were in there the whole building’s power went out! You could still see a little, from the natural light coming in through the front windows, but I guess it was a security risk for them so they asked all the customers to step outside until the power came back on about ten minutes later. I had visions of NYC flashing through my head of course, but it wasn’t like that; all the other stores in the vicinity had power. It must take a hell of a lot of electricity to run that place, with at least 100 computers turned on and the AC blasting.
3AM, time for bed…!
August 24th, 2003 at 6:13 pm
you know i can never resist your puppy dog look! that’s just not playing fair ;-)
john
August 24th, 2003 at 8:37 pm
Sorry ’bout that… upon re-reading I think I might have made it seem like you were being some kinda controlling freak. I know very well you were merely reminding me that my health should come first, because you love me and don’t want to see me to turn into a toothless old hag!
August 24th, 2003 at 10:55 pm
I have a Powerbook G3, and I’ve been using Yellow Dog Linux on it for a while now (though I haven’t upgraded to 3.0). It’s pretty much a Mac-centric Red Hat; by and large it’s decent product, and while it lacks the nifty Knoppix live install, it has everything I use (except 2.3 has some weird issues with my wireless cards, but only at home, not at work). A couple of my friends have had good success with setting up Debian on their Macs, including an ibook. Not quite as friendly as YDL, but it’s another option to look at. Gentoo’s also available for Macs, but I haven’t used that on any architecture as of yet; my attempts to set up on the notebook were met with failure.
But hey, you’ve got choices for getting Linux onto your notebook.
August 25th, 2003 at 1:08 am
I’m reading about Yellow Dog right now, it sounds great. I guess I always knew people were running Linux on their Macs, but back when I was using it heavily (around ’99 I guess) I never had a Mac so I paid no attention.
The more I work with it, the more I’m starting to prefer working on Linux over OS X!! :-O Which is why I’m leaning in this direction. I do like some of the iApps a lot, but I only use a few of them with any regularity. iTunes rocks, that’s for sure. I use iPhoto, but it’s really too cumbersome for what I’m doing. I use Mail, but I don’t think it’s any better than some other apps I’ve used like Eudora. I don’t use Safari, I don’t use iCal anymore (again, too cumbersome). I’ve got third-party apps that I like a lot, most notably NetNewsWire, Tinderbox, Circus Ponies NoteBook, CDFinder — but do I really *need* them? Harmony Assistant is the only one I can think of that I really do need, and probably can’t replace. I have a lot of money (for me) invested in other apps that I don’t even use often enough to justify having paid for them, like Dreamweaver and PS Elements. Still, even with all the money I’ve poured into it, it’s getting harder and harder to justify not sticking with open-source as much as possible. What happens when my iBook breaks down and dies; can I afford to replace it? It’ll take awhile at the rate I’m going. I’m already pretty firmly convinced that I’m NOT going to be lining up to buy Panther, especially now that I’ve rediscovered another OS that in many ways works a hell of a lot better, and I didn’t have to pay $129 to try it out and make sure it was right for me.
Speaking of which, y’all were right about apt-get, it’s the bomb! I don’t even want to think about how many headaches it’s spared me already. I always liked RPM (because I’m lazy) and apt is like an RPM for RPM. I’ve only run into one or two apps that I couldn’t get through apt, and had to compile on my own.