Moving from Mac OS X to Ubuntu: Adding a dash of HP

After my recent purge of old Apple equipment, I had some money left over to buy a cheap laptop.  I settled on a HP Pavilion g6.  The first thing I did was create a USB Ubuntu installer drive and erase Windows and it’s associated restore tools etc from the system, I won’t ever require Windows media because I never run Windows as a host OS, only as a guest through virtualisation.

There were no major issues, I’ve had to disable the ability to suspend automatically when the lid shuts. This is because the laptop will not wake up properly under Ubuntu if the lid is closed, forcing a reset. That was fixed by switching to the AMD Radeon display driver.

Coming from the MacBook Pro unibody 13″, the HP’s 15″ screen, although not as bright feels enormous.

Overall, I really like the machine.

The Day of the Nexus 7

Today has been a good day, the wife and I went and bought our Google Nexus 7 tablets.  Having already made the transition away from the iPad and iOS, I have been using Android quite happily with my Samsung Galaxy SIII (which replaced my iPhone).  Adding my apps to my new Nexus 7 and setting it up as I wanted it was quite effortless, as was updating to the latest revision of Jelly Bean.

A lot of the FUD I has read about ‘non-tablet’ optimized apps was mostly nonsense, every major app I use seems optimised quite well.  Only one app I used, designed to measure the speed of a broadband connection, was not suitable for a tablet display.

With the addition of an office suite, the only other ‘needed’ apps were certain games I enjoyed on iOS. The situation is much better than it used to be, in fact, every major game I wanted is available, for example Asphalt 7, Real Racing 2, Need for Speed, Sonic 4 etc.

My wife finds the form-factor to be much preferable to a large iPad, as do I.  I guess it is purely subjective but the device feels.. right.  For me, it’s the right size, big enough to do web browsing comfortably, just right for reading, perfect for gaming, yet, crucially small and light enough to carry without being a burden.

 

 

Making the change: Converting from Mac OS X to Ubuntu Linux

I recently decided to leave Apple’s products for many reasons, after decades of using their hardware and software products.  My MacBook Air and the household iPads are being sold. With the proceeds I am buying a NAS server box, a couple of Google Nexus tablets and probably a very small cute 11″ laptop by Hewlett Packard that I have my beady eye on.

I will be retaining one Apple laptop, that being the heat damaged one from my ill-fated laptop-as-a-server experiment, it is functional but not really worth selling now. So I thought it would be a good idea to replace it’s copy of Mac OS X Mountain Lion with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin).

After installing rEFIt to allow the machine to boot Linux, I downloaded and installed a MacBook optimised amd64 version from ubuntu.com.  I had no major problems, the screen ran at eye-melting maximum brightness and the display had a blue tint to it, after installing the Mac’s native ICC colour profile and adjusting a few items in the NVIDIA X server settings, I managed to tweak it to my liking.  There are a few NVIDIA ‘complications’ on the machine, I get a corrupted login screen after suspending, but it’s fine as I don’t need to see the display to login back in. Also playback in VLC results in a black screen/window, if I open a movie with Ubuntu’s default video player first then VLC works fine afterwards.  I had to adjust the default video player’s colour hue because video colour was.. weird, everything seemed blue and red.

After getting everything setup the way I wanted it, I transferred all my data from the MacBook Air being sold and started foraging for software to replace my Mac equivalents.  I am running all my favourite open-source and free software like Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, Transmission, VLC, VirtualBox and Google’s Chrome browser.  I have also discovered new software that I am enjoying, like the lightweight scriptwriting software Trelby (replacing my usual bloated Celtx), the comprehensive LibreOffice suite, Shotwell to replace iPhoto, Rhythmbox to replace iTunes and OpenShot to replace iMovie (and I mean the original good iMovie, not the newer crappy one).

Ubuntu has come a long way over the years, I hated it’s desktop in the past, way too much dung-brown for my tastes but Canonical seem to have put a lot of work into not only redesigning the desktop but creating a truly unique look and feel.  The Ubuntu UI styling and those gorgeous fonts make normally drab looking GTK+ apps look fantastic,  LibreOffice for example looks great on Ubuntu compared to Mac OS X.  As Apple have clearly shown aesthetics are important, developers can make some brilliant applications but some haven’t got a clue about good design, I’ve used some amazing software but with the most damn ugly or awkward interfaces (esp. in the UNIX world).  Canonical seem to have learned to marry good software engineering with good visual design and I applaud them for doing so.  Not only have they produced a first class, enterprise-ready Linux distribution, but they have created something that is visually pleasing and very powerful with an amazing range of software both open sourced and commercial through the Ubuntu Software Centre.

As I said at the beginning, I am getting a small form factor PC laptop for myself which should run Ubuntu just fine. I’m not intending to use the MacBook myself for too long, the wife is keen to have it as her own Ubuntu machine after seeing it for herself.  But as the first step into a Linux-only world, I’ve been really pleased with the results. I have no regrets and I am missing nothing from OS X, until recently I never believed I would think that way.

The Wife on iOS 6: I’ve gained nothing but a ****ing headache!

This was my wife’s reaction to the latest update to iOS 6.  She says not only has her user experience of the App Store on the phone been diminished, but according to the now severely downgraded Maps app we live in a giant pixel surrounded by a monochrome landscape.

What can I say?  To all iOSers out there, good luck with iOS 6.  YMMV.

Thank heavens I’ve recently switched to Android, I love Google maps and I would be fuming if I’d lost it.. ..just because Apple decided.

 

iPhone 5 – The biggest thing to happen to iPhone since iPhone

Well, that’s what Apple are saying. Although I loved the iPod Touch and iPad, the iPhone never did it for me. It always felt like an iPod Touch with a very basic phone added, for a hefty price.  Moving from the HTC Desire to the iPhone 4 left a very bitter taste in my mouth, I found myself not really using it to be honest except for texts and calls. I installed apps but never used them. Since Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) I felt the platform actually surpassed iOS, despite all the fanfare and carefully crafted marketing, Apple seems to have lost it’s innovative edge and the new iPhone 5 does nothing to change my view.  There is nothing in the new product that inspires or interests me, an extra row of icons and a slightly bigger screen – wow.

Using a MacBook as a Server

I saw an article earlier this year about using an old MacBook as a file and/or media server. The trick is to run an app in the background which allows the machine to run with the lid closed, the app itself ran great but I eventually discovered problems running an Apple laptop over a long period.

First a power supply went bang after just a month, fortunately I had a backup power supply, but if I hadn’t I’d have been in real trouble. Replacement Apple power supplies are not exactly cheap.

By the time the server had been running for a couple of months, the machine developed cracks around the hinge and began to run ever hotter even when idle.

I’ve been forced to shut it down now, which has been a real pain in the butt because my wife and I came to rely on it to access our data and media.

MacBook Air – Style over Substance

After all my years as an Apple user, I truly feel that the MacBook Air maybe the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Unfortunately, there is no mechanism to return a Mac or get a refund just because I do not like it, but something about this machine just does not sit right. Yes it’s thin, so thin I worry about flexing it and yes it’s nippy, but that is due to the SSD.  Yes it sports a nice Intel i5 processor, but you will never be able to harness the power of it, not without the machine running so hot that the fans feel like they are about to come flying out at a million rpm.

I do not appear to be the only person on this planet to have mixed feelings about the MacBook Air, in many ways it feels like a very, very, VERY expensive netbook.  There, I’ve said it.  I feel like I have spent over a thousand £ pounds on a computer that feels like it should be a lot, lot less.  Even the redeeming factor of running Mac OS X is mitigated by the fact that Apple have decided to make the “world’s most advanced desktop OS” increasingly like the mobile iOS.

I can’t even re-install the OS if it fouls up, despite having an external optical drive which has served me well with every other MacBook I’ve owned, Apple will not allow booting on the MBA. Oh yeah, I forgot, Apple have decided I don’t need to re-install my OS from optical media.  So if the machine is fouled up, my choices for getting it up and running again are severely restricted, if I can’t boot the SSD for example and the recovery partition is inaccessible, I’ve had it.. ..and I’ve paid a pretty penny for the privilege.

Another recent event underlined Apple’s stupidity to me recently.  When our broadband went down, the first thing their support dept asked me to do was connect to my router with a wired ethernet connection, imagine my embarrassment having to explain that my very expensive premium Apple computer doesn’t have an ethernet port, because Apple decided I didn’t need it anymore.  I’ve had enough of Apple dictating what I do and do not need, or how I can use my devices.  I’ve had enough of spending a fortune on machines which are just not up to the job or lack basic flexibility.