Ubuntu 12.04 on macbook pro

-

I'm a long time linux user, I installed my first distro in 1994, it was slackware and required a bunch of floppies and was a fairly painful process. Over the years, I migrated from slackware to redhat and finally settled on Ubuntu as my "daily driver". Every computer in our house (a server, three laptops, and two netbooks) is currently funning a flavor of Ubuntu and I decided to give setting up my work machine (macbook pro) with Ubuntu. The big reason I like Ubuntu is that they are doing a good job of making an operating system (OS) that finds a great balance between "you can do anything you want" and "I just want it to work". Ubuntu has thousands of free software packages that are tested and verified to work that will install with the click of a button. Windows and OSX are so far behind in this regard as to not even be contenders. While there is a little more technical knowledge necessary to get Ubuntu up and running, it typically has so many rewards in the richness of free software that it vastly outweighs the negatives.

I downloaded ubuntu 12.04 LTS, burned the cd, then against all warning and my better judgement, started the install on a train ride home (about 1 hour 20). Note, the installer tells you to be "plugged in", but like a kid with a new toy on Christmas day, I just couldn't wait. The install didn't quite finish, so I closed the lid, a little disappointed, and thinking I was certainly going to be in for an adventure the next morning (perhaps even having to reload my entire machine). The next morning, while waiting for the train, I opened the lid of my mac and unbelievably, the install continued where it left off! One thing I will note is that I did have a wireless internet connection by tethering with my cell phone. Also, for non computer geeks, I would not recommend this technique at home... recovering a machine from a failed OS install can be a horribly frustrating activity and is not recommended for the faint at heart. My recommendation is, if the installer tells you to do it while plugged in, DO IT! That having been said, Kudos to the installer team, I was frankly amazed.

After the install finished, I poked around a little and while the display seems a little less smooth, my machine seems to be functioning well. I will note a couple of gotchas I'm working through right now:

Two finger scroll doesn't work out of the box.

Going to mouse preferences and selecting "two finger scroll" enabled this. I'm not sure why this isn't the default, maybe windows trackpads don't do this out of the box and it was thought it would be confusing?

The trackpad registers touches unexpectedly

This is a beef I've had with Ubuntu for a while on other laptops, the track pad doesn't seem to disable quickly enough when I'm typing and occasionally my mouse pointer will find it's way to the top of my screen. In perusing the documentation, it appears there are some workarounds to make this less of a problem... I'll continue to investigate.

Gwibber seems broken when hooking to facebook

When hooking Gwibber to my facebook account, it seems to not work. There is a bug reported and confirmed right now and I can only assume it will be fixed shortly. Frankly as this capability didn't exist with my Mac (without installing more software) I'm not going to mark it as a serious problem, but I hope to get this working soon.

In my first hour of use (I'm writing this post in ubuntu on my mac on the train right now)l these are the only minor issues I've noted. For any self respecting linux user who really likes Mac hardware, I'm going to highly recommend this as the time to make the switch.

More to follow...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Please use ANSI-92 SQL Join Syntax

-
Image
Way back in 1992, a standard was published for SQL. In it, the syntax for specifying joins in SQL Database was finally standardized. This was a good thing because (for folks who've been doing this a while), trying to decode the vagaries of how various Databases handled outer joins could drive you bonkers yielding different results depending on the parse order of things in the from and where clauses. Unfortunately, some DBMS vendors took a while to adopt this standard (Oracle didn't support it until 2001), but at this point if you're using a major RDBMS and NOT using it, you're probably mired in a tradition or habit that bears changing. As an example of what I'm describing, here are some examples of what I mean. Old School (no standard syntax + implementation and evaluation of predicates varied by vendor [and query]): select * from customer, order where customer.customer = order.customerid ANSI way (agreed to standard, predicate evaluation has some rules ...
Read more

The difference between Scalability, Performance, Efficiency, and Concurrency explained

-
I thought I'd give some explanation of the difference between scalability, performance, Efficiency, and concurrency. To make things more accessible (and because I'm watching a cooking show on TV) I'm going to use a baking metaphor to help explain the differences. In our case, the system in question is baking cookies for consumers. Scalability, is how well something responds to adding more resources. If we can double our capacity by doubling the number of resources, we've got linear scalability. In our baking example, if we add more ingredients, we can scale to a larger number of cookies. To contrast with our other metrics, this doesn't actually increase the performance of creating a single cookie (they still take 10 minutes to bake), and the efficiency is the same (we just have more capacity). We also cannot bake more cookies in a fixed time period, but over a larger time period we can produce more cookies. Performance is how fast something can get done, u...
Read more

the myth of asynchronous JDBC

-
Image
I keep seeing people (especially in the scala/typesafe world) posting about async jdbc libraries. STOP IT! Under the current APIs, async JDBC belongs in a realm with Unicorns, Tiger Squirrels, and 8' spiders. While you might be able to move the blocking operations and queue requests and keep your "main" worker threads from blocking, jdbc is synchronous. At some point, somewhere, there's going to be a thread blocking waiting for a response. It's frustrating to see so many folks hyping this and muddying the waters. Unless you write your own client for a dbms and have a dbms that can multiplex calls over a single connection (or using some other strategy to enable this capability) db access is going to block. It's not impossible to make the calls completely async, but nobody's built it yet. Yes, I know ajdbc is taking a stab at this capability, but even IT uses a thread pool for the blocking calls (be default). Someday we'll have async databa...
Read more