Flutterby™! : iPain 2007-10-22 20:01:13.546911+00

iPain

2007-10-22 20:01:13.546911+00 by Dan Lyke 10 comments

Argh. I think I now officially hate the Mac platform as much as Windows. Windows doesn't try to be Un*x or anything standard. Windows is just different. The Mac tries to be Un*x, except where Apple thinks they can make it "better", which usually means "broken in arcane ways" and "you're going to spend hours trying to figure out what flags they used when compiling libraries, or trying to reverse engineer init scripts so that they work with launchd".

Or trying to figure out WTF they're trying to accomplish with their GUI tools for server management, and so forth.

Grrrr...

Meanwhile, I've had some experiences with Vista recently that were like "okay, if I were just out of college, I'd have implemented that that way too", as opposed to the "okay, if I were a spider monkey on acid..."

I think, for better or worse, I'm sticking with WinXP for pretty much everything until I finish my PhD - as long as Bill Gates allows it...

Later, when I'm getting paid to play again, I'll work out virtualizing XP so I can run ESRI ArcGIS in a window under Ubuntu.

I run an xp image under vmware in Kubuntu 7-10 now. It works quite well for everything except for directX applications like most games. vmware player is free, but to create an image, you have to have vmware workstation. I picked it up a few years ago for windows for around $160, but it's been worth it.

It's nice having w2k, winxp, pcbsd, and now an alternate ubuntu vm at my disposal. If I need to install some horrific monstrosity of a program (like mono) I put it on the ubuntu vm, then delete a copy and replace it with a duplicate.

While the fancy 3-D effects can cause some issues, Ubuntu 7.10 is rocking on 2 crummy machines. Turn down the Compiz (3-D effects), and it's an incredibly nice packaging of Linux and associated everything. For fun: I loaded a laptop with Ubuntu Studio, but have not played a lot.. but now I want a MIDI keyboard.

#Comment Re: made: 2007-10-23 12:35:12.77158+00 by: JT [edit history]

I forgot to add... if you're going to run vm's, max out your memory. Running on a 512, I could barely get 2k to putt along and WinXP took way too long to load. I boosted up to 2G with decent ram and now the vm's run as fast as a standard machine. My only issue has been with Antivirus. Use clamwin for an occasional scan since the real-time protection like Avast and especially AVG makes things slow to a crawl at times.

#Comment Re: made: 2007-10-23 12:35:32.497784+00 by: Mark A. Hershberger

On NeXT, I ran into that "Steve Jobs" way of doing name services. They couldn't use NIS or anything like that. They had to go off and implement Netinfo, something that survives in OS X.

As long as nothing breaks, great. But when it breaks, you have to discover a new way of doing things and you start to wonder why they felt the need to re-implement a broken system.

#Comment Re: made: 2007-10-23 13:00:44.604266+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

JT, have you tried any of the WINE derivatives? Charlene uses Crossover Office for QuickBooks, and it rocks.

meuon, I'm totally head over heels with Ubuntu, especially relative to these other platforms. Charlene deals with it, I deal with it, life is good. I need to upgrade my machine, but I was going to wait 'til the rush died down a bit.

Mark, Netinfo got dropped somewhere around 10.2, I discovered this because I thought it'd be a good way of tracking down a UID yesterday (I've got the UID the process is running under, but it's not in /etc/passwd and the docs on the web for finding it all talk you through using a GUI), but it wasn't.

I think the "reimplement a broken system" syndrome comes from the fact that fixing stuff is hard, and less competent programmers think they can build a better "X" without thinking through the difficulties of "X". Thus we end up with things like Netinfo, Direct-X, that sort of thing. The underlying frameworks of the Mac are filled with this sort of stuff, perhaps not as bad in terms of abandoned APIs as Microsoft, but pretty gnarly.

Dan, I tried WINE, but the issue is that I need native browsers running on the actual OS for testing of code. IE6 runs different on Win2k, WinXP, and WINE, so I have to have a couple of options to see if something is really a problem, or just a browser/os specific issue.

Maybe off-topic, but does Ubuntu come in 64-bit flavors (i.e., can address more than 4GB of RAM) and can it virtualize 32-bit OSes?

Part of my problem is that I use apps that like lots of RAM. For instance, I might be running ArcGIS and Illustrator at the same time. Both of these prefers a gigabyte to themselves. I'd be very much inclined to pursue Ubuntu+virtualization if I could do it on a 64-bit box with, say, 16GB of RAM and run 32-bit WinXP in a window, giving it a full 4GB of RAM.

It does, I run 64 bit Kubuntu dual-boot on my gaming machine with an Athlon AM2 dual-core 4200, which works rather nicely. My main current linux machine is a 32bit P4 3.2Ghz with 2G RAM, but it runs a couple of vm's pretty quickly at once.

Once I update my gaming machine next year, I'm going to up the ram in my current to 4-8G and start running kubuntu full-time with some vm's for testing. my current machine doesn't have AGP, which is a huge problem when you want to run dual monitors with a decent card, so I want to upgrade to get a second 1680x1050 sceptre to expand my desktop a bit when I change machines... I'm thinking this pci-e Nv7900 will run better than the pci 5500 I'm running now also.

Thank you! I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one thinking that way. The more OS X I see, the more I feel like if Apple were shown a good tack hammer, they'd want to "improve" it because it's not also a ballpeen hammer, a deadblow hammer, a 14-pound sledgehammer, a bandsaw, a crowbar, a chalkline, and a PEZ dispenser.