Andrew Channels Dexter Pinion

Wherein I write some stuff that you may like to read. Or not, its up to you really.

November 22, 2005

Woe

My iBook has died. I am desolate.

I'm not sure what is wrong. I packed it into my bag at the end of the day and when I got home it wouldn't wake from it's nap. Even pressing the on/off button for the specified ten seconds didn't seem to make a difference. Until it seemed to start up and all I got was the cpu fan spinning rather manically. At that point I found that the only way to stop it was to reset the PMU and figured that it was not a well laptop.

Even worse, when I took it to the local Apple dealer to see if they could fix it they told me that they wouldn't be able to look at it for at least a week.

So I'm stuck in a Windows only world and it's rather a rude shock. Luckily all of my data is in flat files, my scripts are all in Python and everything is backed up so I can carry on. But it's not the same.

Here's hoping that it can be fixed because money's tight and I'm not sure I can afford a replacement at the moment.

Posted by Andy Todd at November 22, 2005 07:26 PM

Comments

Time to give Ubuntu a try? :)

Posted by: ludo on November 22, 2005 10:21 PM

I feel for you, I really do. Hope your baby gets well soon.

Posted by: Simon Brunning on November 22, 2005 10:23 PM

I installed Ubuntu Breezy on my work laptop as soon as it was released. Here is why it isn't as good as Mac OSX;

1. My wireless card doesn't work without some insane installation ritual using NDISWRAPPER and a bucket of chicken blood.
2. It doesn't run Quicksilver [1]
3. My wireless card doesn't work.
4. There is no number 4.
5. My wireless card still doesn't bloody work despite the fact that I spent extra money to buy a name brand card that a quick Google search said works fine under Linux.
6. I can't easily share files between Windows and Ubuntu because the file systems are incompatible. Mounting my NTFS partition under Ubuntu is a permissions nightmare and mounting my ext3 Ubuntu file system under Windows is practically impossible.

This is why I gave up running a half finished operating system and bought a Mac in the first place.

[1] http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/

Posted by: Andy Todd on November 23, 2005 08:32 AM

Yeah, it's about time someone fixed Wireless under Linux. It's shocking.

Posted by: Richard Jones on November 23, 2005 10:26 AM

What a bugger! I hope it's fixed for you soon.

Posted by: Keith Pitty on November 23, 2005 11:38 AM

ext2fsd [1] works quite well under Windows, and mounting ntfs read only is very easy, just add uid=xxx,gid=xxx to the relevant fstab entry (setting xxx to your uid and gid).

As for wireless, you must be very unlucky, as I did not have any problems with either of my three cards...

Anyway, I hope your Mac has already been repaired and this comment is useless :)

[1] http://www.tuningsoft.com/projects/projects.htm#ext2fsd

Posted by: ludo on November 24, 2005 08:30 AM

Have been running Ubuntu Breezy on my laptop with a Linksys WPC54G card. No chickens slaughtered, just lots of swearing as I tried to work out what inf file I should use. Ubuntu is so good with everything else installing and running it's a shame you need to be a techie to get a wireless card working. But never being enlightened enough to buy an Apple, I like the fact battery life with Ubuntu is 40 minutes better than with M$ XP on the same laptop.

Posted by: Mark Rees on November 28, 2005 09:16 AM