First MacBook

Greetings and Salutations!

I'm anxiously awaiting my first MacBook, sitting in my kitchen with a cup of joe and XM radio playing in the background (Audio Visions, ambient ethereal music). I'm posting with my ThinkPad running SuSE Linux v10.0.

I'm new to the forum but not exactly new to Apple. My first experience with Apple was with the first generation Apple Macintosh. This was at work, and our comany was a solid Mac supporter. It was a pretty little machine, and it was cool even then. All the graphics were handled in firmware as I recall, and it always felt fast. Ha! It held everything on a single sided normal density "floppy" holding 400K (as in kilobytes) - "System", apps, et al. My favorite toy on the Mac was Flight Simulator.

Times changed, and our company moved away from Mac to PCs. The PC world being what it is, I did a fun personal migration to Linux, a move I'll never regret. While I'm forever saying things like "Gawd I hate Windows", more and more I've been saying of Linux, "What is wrong with you people?!" Ultimately I simply want things to work.

In recent years I worked on a real-world research project with another person. He did his work on a PowerPC running OS X while I worked on a PC running Linux. Our work was in Python. I was duly impressed with what he could accomplish with it. We were able to run our work on Sun Solaris and even some of it on a PC running Windows.

Ah, but I must cut this short. My new machine was just delivered. ^_^ I'm familiar with the two linked guides to switching, as well as some of the O'Reilly books on the Mac. I'm also holding expectations for the Mac to be what it is, without expecting it to be like Windows or Linux. This should be good.

I'll be back later.

Welcome to the forums.

Congrats on your purchase.

Times changed, and our company moved away from Mac to PCs. The PC world being what it is, I did a fun personal migration to Linux, a move I'll never regret. While I'm forever saying things like "Gawd I hate Windows", more and more I've been saying of Linux, "What is wrong with you people?!" Ultimately I simply want things to work.

Click to expand...

I love Linux (sad as that may be) but my god I agree with you on that statement - I often think Linux is kept hard so that only a select group of people can use it

mathogre, you are exactly the sort of person who might be interested in my "Linux to Mac Switcher's Guide". Like you, I migrated to Macs from Linux (in my case Arch Linux 0.7.1, but I was also dual booting SuSE 9.3). I found myself poorly served by all the Windows focused switcher's guides and eventually wrote one myself, in terms and with references that would make intuitive sense to Linux users.

http://www.campbell-tx.net/MacOSX/Linux2Mac/linux2mac.html

Have a look and let me know if it helps!

Oh, and welcome to Mac-Forums! And welcome to the world of Macs! You will be amazed how much Mac OS X gives you the best of the open source world plus all of that marvellous, if not free (as in beer) software! Enjoy!!

Thanks RNDdave and mac57! mac57, I've looked at your page, and it will be most helpful. Thank you!

At present I'm doing this from another machine while my new MacBook downloads s/w updates. Fortunately I've got a fast connection (Verizon FiOS) so it won't take forever.

THE GOOD STUFF

So far the machine seems to be doing what it's supposed to do. When I connected via Ethernet it was fine (though I couldn't get it to connect through my wireless - yet - and I doubt it will be a problem).

THE ANNOYANCE

One corner of the track pad sticks up above the handrest plate. This is a reconditioned machine purchased directly thru Apple, and I'm not impressed it came through this way. That said, it otherwise works fine.

Anyway, the new machine is in the middle of the OS X update (300MB) and should complete shortly.

More later!

And now I'm pleased to say I'm posting this through my new MacBook. Whee! I've done the s/w updates, think I've gotten the aforementioned annoyance somewhat tamed (apparently the pad wasn't sufficiently glued), am now actually running on my own home network (error on my network side).

I've got a long way to go to get used to this machine, but it looks good.

Glad to hear that it came out of the box safely... Watch out for those sharp edges! Enjoy your new lappy

Welcome to Mac-Forums, mathogre! And congratulations on your brand new MacBook.

If you have any questions take a look at the stickies when you enter the Switcher Hangout sub-forum, they contain a lot of info and if you don't find what you are looking for, just post and we'll do our best to help out.

:girl:

Thanks too, neyoung and MacHeadCase. I think it's too late however.

AHHAHAHAHAHAHA

Fun with Photobooth!

Cool!

Congrats on the new machine.

Another happy customer!

Is Photobooth something that comes with a Mac or is it extra?

It comes with the OS on built-in iSight models. Like I have an iMac G5 with built-in iSight so I have Photobooth.

Thats a bummer. I have a mini.

I just went from a PPC first generation Mini to one of the new core duo Macbooks (from which I'm posting this yay!). Right now Parallels is running in another screen (virtuedesktops) running windows update.

This thing is gonna be sweet! But I think my wife is already getting uber jealous since she's still stuck with her PPC Mini, though to be fair she has the faster Mini.

Had a little problem getting the wireless going (what, you have to put a $ in front of the WEP passphrase? No Way!) but other than that this is pretty cool. Looking forward to taking it to work tomorrow and trying out that dual spanned monitor thing. I used to staring at a 20" CRT at 1600x1200 resoloution, but this little widescreen thing might just be not all that bad.

I like how dashboard does the ripple thing that I've heard of forever, but the Mini didn't have the graphics for it, this keyboard is pretty cool, and virtue desktops actually does the eye candy (unlike with the Mini where it just switches desktops.)

But what the hey. The Mini was a three year experiment to determine whether I could switch completely from Windows/Linux to the Mac that has been a resounding succes!

Ripple thing?

nukemm said:

Ripple thing?

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You drop a widget into the dashboard screen, and it does a 'ripple' like you're dropping it into a pool of water.

Old hat for those who have had Macs capable of displaying it with the graphics hardware, but a 1st generation Mini did not. The higher end machines (like this one) does. It's pretty cool.

Hey, I've only been a Mac user for three years now.

mac57 said:

http://www.campbell-tx.net/MacOSX/Linux2Mac/linux2mac.html

Click to expand...

After nearly 38 hours I've done a few things. -_^ Firefox is up and running and seems more familiar to me under OS X than under either Linux or whats-its-name. XaoS (fractal program) works pretty well, and has produced a couple images I can now use as wallpaper. I have some fun widgets working for me under the Dashboard, some of which came from the Outside World. Wow, what a nice function the Dashboard is.

More importantly I have X11 up and running on my new baby.

mac57, your help site set me in the direction to installing X11. Thank you!

I'm now using the book "Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks" as a support book. I'm also getting some marginal info from the Apple website.

An observation or two (heavily infested with geekiness, btw, so please pardon me!)...

* Either quartz-wm is just basically an empty window manager, or I've Got a Problem. When I run X11 in full screen mode (sorry if I fall back to Linux-speak, which is probable), I get a blank wm and an xterm (based on the copy of .xinitrc from /etc...). I don't even get any menus. My guess is it's the former as twm works under OS X as it does on most every other X11 system.

* fink is essential for running any real window manager. My preference is to run enlightenment as a stand-alone wm, though I've run and configured fvwm/fvwm2 with considerable success and pleasure. I never really liked gnome or kde. I've been running Linux for 10 years, and I still prefer the commandline. Mostly what I run is a desktop with multiple virtual windows filled with xterms and emacs copies.

* OS X and the accompanying X11 tools don't necessarily make for a complete generic Unix development environment. For instance, emacs, even when running X11, is the console version. It's not as if this is a great problem, as I recently used an "Enterprise" version of Red Hat Linux that was not Python construct aware. I know there are some development tools in OS X, so lack of a good version of emacs isn't necessarily a big problem. I also know there's a version of emacs downloadable from the Apple site. I know I have options, and I knew coming over to Apple that Unix was more a foundation (a very good thing, that) than a development environment.

BUT - this is NOT to rebuke OS X (which I was happy to verify the word "rebuke" in the Oxford American Dictionary that came with my machine), but to more or less give a status as to where I am and perhaps verify I'm headed in the correct direction. In the end I'll find my way through all of this, but a helpful gentle nudge is appreciated, even from this otherwise DIY person.

Best!

P.S.

My daughter and I were playing some more w/ Photo Booth. I've attached one of the more artsy pics, though we had more than one where be both look like aliens from another planet. Hard work is fine, but I haven't laughed this much in ages. Can you imagine working on a tool like Photo Booth?!

MacBook: Day 6

Let's see...

Last night I connected to work via VPN (VPN3000 client from Cisco, work requirement) and used cotvnc (Chicken of the VNC) viewer to connect to my vnc session on one of the lab machines running Linux. While there I opened the Windows 2003 server to check work email (viewed on the Linux server via rdesktop). X11 is up and running, and getting ready to ingest fink and a few key Unix applications. MacOffice 2004 is on order (home use program through work).

I've got lots of widgets set up in the Dashboard (and someday I'll remember it's called the Dashboard). The animations on the machine are very nice, and I'm NOT one for desktop animation. Late last night I tried voice on the machine, getting it to read text to me and having it tell me a joke. (It likes the names "Computer" and "Aerin" (a D&D character of mine), but doesn't particularly respond to "Data" (as in "Commander Data")). My daughter will like that it can tell "knock knock" jokes.

I've locked it up four times already, though recovery never required anything drastic. It's okay. I've crashed Linux boxes in the past, once exposing a kernel bug. If there's a way to break a machine, I'll usually find it. (I have lots of fun crashing Windows boxes.)

My new little machine can actually play some DVDs from Australia Geographic magazine. Recent issues have had DVDs in them on various parts of Oz. They are supposed to be playable on a PC, but even my 9 month old higher end PC couldn't view them without choking. My little MacBook can easily view them, however. -_^

I love the turntable menu (DVD, Music, Video, and Photos), and especially love browsing the movie trailers. I also like getting access to my playlists on iTunes. The little remote is just perfect for this (though I know I can do it through the keyboard).

It's still early, but so far this has been a good experience. This machine can do real work, and it is fun and pretty.

mathorgre, before you take the plunge into fink, check out DarwinPorts. I tried both and found DarwinPorts had more packages available and seemed easier to use. I would recommend it over fink, personally.

I'm glad to see another satisfied switcher. VPN is pretty sweet, I can't wait until I get a job that I can work from home via VPN...

I'm actually kind of envious.