Moving to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) on my Macbook 2,1

I'm the happy owner/user of a Macbook (a 2,1 to be exact) since a few years. Actually it is company property, but since I'm the only user they let me run whatever I like. Which happens to be Ubuntu.

It was really Willem who set me on to this; I don't think I would have had the guts to do this to my Mac if he hadn't been adamant that it would work. And it does! It did require quite a few tweaks, though, as the Ubuntu community page testifies.

But overall I was happily running 9.10 (Karmic); I learned to live with the few quirks, like having to log off every time I came into work and attached the external monitor (it would crash the video driver if I didn't). And suspend/resume was just really slow.

Now that Lucid is just around the corner, and after my previous success with installing it on my wife's new desktop, I got feisty and tried it on the Mac. First, I used the live CD and that worked so splendidly that I just had to do the actual upgrade. It lasted all night, but in the end it worked like a charm.

So it's worth at this point to make a few notes.

• The new theme did not appear the first time I booted. This was to be expected because I did an upgrade, not a fresh install. Most things should preferably stay as they were.
• The ssh-agent environment variables were gone from my terminal shells. Why? I don't know, but a somewhat related bug report suggests the use of the keychain package.
• Thunderbird 3.0 is chugging away on indexing all my mail. I could turn it off but I think I'll let it run for a while and check out the new search capability.
• Sound didn't immediately work on the live CD but this was resolved by killing the pulseaudio daemon. Sound does work after the upgrade.
• The volume and brightness buttons work too. Very nice.
• Attaching the external monitor turns off the desktop effects. This may be related to the crash bug I mentioned earlier. But you can turn it back on right after.
  

That's it for now, more news later!

Windows versus Mac OS

I just set up a virtual machine with Windows XP on my Apple MacBook. I've been using Linux since the mid-90s (and more recently, Mac OS X), and although I have used Windows at work in the past, I never actually had to go through the chores of installing and managing a Windows box myself.
The installation was a snap, but the trouble began when Windows really booted for the first time. So that is roughly the same point where so many normal consumers are when they take their shiny new computer out of the box, plug it in, and turn it on.
I was immediately warned by a yellow balloon in the lower right corner that my system may be at risk. The system insisted that I should turn on automatic updates, and install some anti-virus software. A colleague pointed me to avg, which was helpful, but before I settled down to do what I meant to do when I decided I needed windows (visiting a web site with Internet Explorer), I spent several hours boiler plating my Windows virtual machine, all the while feeling scared, like prey being hunted, as if the predatory dangers of malware and viruses could infect me any time until I secured everything completely.

So this led to the following epiphany:

The first thing you do when you use a new Mac, is get to work.
The first thing you do when you use Windows, is get to worry.