jwz - that was, in fact, the final straw. [entries|archive|friends|userinfo]
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that was, in fact, the final straw. [Fri, 10-Jun-2005 5:27 AM]
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[music |New Order -- Denial]

Remember last week, when I tried to buy exactly the same audio card that 99.99% of the world owns and convince Linux to be able to play two sounds at once? Yeah, turns out, that was the last straw. I bought an iMac, and now I play my music with iTunes.

This took... let me see... just about zero effort. Well, I still have to go buy some longer audio cables, but that's it.

I plugged a mouse with three buttons and a wheel into the Mac, and it just worked without me having to read the man page on xorg.conf or anything. Oh frabjous day.

Go ahead and say "I told you so" if it makes you feel better.

Anyway, this means several things:

  • You shouldn't be holding your breath waiting for a new release of Gronk.

  • I also got to stop using the crapware known as Mozilla Sunbird; now I can use iCal, which Just Works (for example, the alarms actually go off, and it doesn't periodically shit a WAV file into my .ics file.)

  • The future direction of xscreensaver has become... highly ambiguous.

I'm still using my other Linux machine to read mail and run XEmacs, but I'm hoping to wean myself of that eventually, one way or another. If all goes well, then in six months or so, the only Linux machines I'll ever have to touch will have no video or sound cards in them at all.

The only thing I couldn't figure out how to do: compile xscreensaver. It stopped working some time between OSX 10.3 and 10.4 due to some GTK/Fink stupidity where pkgconfig/gobject-2.0.pc never gets installed. I'm trying not to care. That's going quite well.

Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys.

linkReply

Comments:
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[User Picture]From: [info]samidha
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 5:32 AM (UTC)

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Congrats!

And, I would have iCal's babies. ;)
[User Picture]From: [info]rawy
Sun, 18-Mar-2007 5:07 PM (UTC)

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Good! Mac sounds good enough
From: [info]zhixel
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 5:51 AM (UTC)

Oh awesome,

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Now queue the million or so 'one of us! one of us!' replies to this.
[User Picture]From: [info]garote
Sun, 12-Jun-2005 12:43 PM (UTC)

Re: Oh awesome,

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One of us! One of us! ;)
[User Picture]From: [info]strange_eyes
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 5:58 AM (UTC)

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jwz switches, in other news, war continues in middle east, starvation continues in africa...

Wanna do a commercial?

From: [info]helixblue
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 6:04 AM (UTC)

fink stupidity? you don't say!

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I got tired of fink brokenness and just moved to DarwinPorts. It behaves a lot like a modernized version of FreeBSD ports for OSX, and has many Apple staff members contributing to it regularly.

Good luck, I highly recommend buying "Mac OS X: The Missing Manual", as it will save you months of learning the little things in OSX. The first thing I did with my Mac was try to turn it into a pure UNIX box, using all of my old UNIX tools, just cause I didn't know any better. After a year of using OSX, I bought the book, and felt like an idiot for the things I had done. The Tiger edition of the book should be out next month according to Amazon.. not that it should really cover all that much more than the previous ones.

[User Picture]From: [info]sc00ter
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 8:14 AM (UTC)

Re: fink stupidity? you don't say!

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I second that. DarwinPorts is where it's at.
From: [info]node
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 6:13 AM (UTC)

carbon xemacs.

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Carbon XEmacs is almost there. You'll need to compile it, though.

Have you seen the (new) Common Lisp emacs clone? It's terminal only right now, and barely implemented, but it's relatively portable (runs on cmucl or sbcl with cl-ncurses).
[User Picture]From: [info]packetslave
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 7:49 AM (UTC)

Re: carbon xemacs.

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Alternatively, GNU Emacs 22.0.50.1 is running quite well (as well as GNU possibly can) natively on my Tiger box. I'm running the build from here. Yeah, it's GNU, but it's less annoying than running X (at least until Carbon Xemacs gets there).
[User Picture]From: [info]ciphergoth
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 6:22 AM (UTC)

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Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys.

You'll be lucky. This will be posted to Slashdot within twelve hours. And then again twelve hours after that.
[User Picture]From: [info]sachmet
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 6:29 AM (UTC)

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But the real question is how many Slashdot Linux fanboys will come flood this post with comments about how [info]jwz "sux cuz he cudnt get a stoopid sound card werkin with linux WHICH R00LZ OMGWTFBBQONEONEONE".

We could almost make it a betting pool.
[User Picture]From: [info]tfofurn
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 6:33 AM (UTC)

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that was, in fact, the final straw.

I'm sure one of DNA's vendors would be happy to sell you more straws. You could get the bendy ones, the ones with the spoons on the end, the extra-thick ones for milkshakes . . .

The only thing I couldn't figure out how to do: compile xscreensaver.

You could always mail yourself a hi-res screen capture of the compile window.
[User Picture]From: [info]jonxp
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 6:35 AM (UTC)

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You know...sound cards and iTunes just work in Windows too. FYI. Of course, it doesn't have nifty iCal. Maybe Sunbird will be up to snuff someday.

However xscreensaver is truly a masterpiece that I dread to see fall by the wayside. It ups the cool factor of any linux box by several hundred points, and phosphor + ljlatest provides top notch party entertainment (as does the new RSS aggregator + bash.org + phosphor).

*sigh*
[User Picture]From: [info]c0nsumer
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 10:38 AM (UTC)

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If you have a Mac with 10.4 handy, I do suggest installing the dev tools and checking out the nifty screensavers that one can write using Quartz Composer.
[User Picture]From: [info]equiraptor
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 6:37 AM (UTC)

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I plugged a mouse with three buttons and a wheel into the Mac, and it just worked
This is exactly why I bought a Mac for my mother. She knows almost nothing about computers, and with Macs, almost everything just works. Only... I used it for a few days (setup, etc.) before giving it to her, and now I want one. They're wonderful machines.
[User Picture]From: [info]grumpy_sysadmin
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 6:40 AM (UTC)

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You may already be doing so, but for X11, you may as well go with Apple's. It's kind of a toss up whether you want the dinky window decoration specialness that comes with rootless (the resize widget is... oddly placed) or want to hook a separate rooted window into the Expos&eaccute;. (I do the former.)

I agree with a previous recommendation of Darwin ports over fink... which I found to behave about like it sounds.

Beyond that, the Apple version mostly Just Fucking Works, so far as I can tell. I don't so much bother trying to build a lot of software on here, though.
[User Picture]From: [info]grumpy_sysadmin
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 6:47 AM (UTC)

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Yeah, so I suck on remembering HTML codes for accented characters. I'm suceeding at not caring.
[User Picture]From: [info]mark242
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 7:12 AM (UTC)

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As your lawyer in this matter, I advise you to pick up a copy of iTerm. Tabbed terminal windows, bookmarks, and some function that is a gigantic workaround for "unset autologout".
[User Picture]From: [info]wfaulk
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 10:14 AM (UTC)

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FWIW, it's pretty easy to change your shell to something else via NetInfo Manager, and OSX ships with zsh (possibly others, too), which, IMO, is way better than the default of tcsh.
[User Picture]From: [info]drstein
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 7:43 AM (UTC)

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I've been bitching about Sunbird/Lightning/wtf ever they're calling it this week for ages. I'll be very surprised when a usable release comes out.

Until then, iCal is a useful piece of work. Have you poked around with iSync at all yet? If you have a cell that it's compatible with (many that aren't on their "official" list work just fine) then it's worth playing around a bit.
[User Picture]From: [info]rpkrajewski
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 8:09 AM (UTC)

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One of the nice things about iCal is that it's a great connector when used with iSync. I've always synch'ed my calendars to my mobile phone, but it's just cool when you subscribe to a new iCal-compatible calendar you found on the web like the "my friends' events" available from upcoming.org, and there it is, in your pocket.
[User Picture]From: [info]dwinsper
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 7:47 AM (UTC)

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I tried Sunbird about six months ago. I tried to like it, I really did, but I just couldn't. It's a shame to see it's still not in a decent state, I really could use a decent calendar. Perhaps I should just install Hula on my server and see what that's like.
[User Picture]From: [info]mstyne
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 7:52 AM (UTC)

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Mayor: What do you mean, "biblical"?
Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God type stuff.
Venkman: Exactly.
Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling.
Spengler: Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes...
Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave.
Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria.
[User Picture]From: [info]agentcooper
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 9:23 AM (UTC)

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You just made me spit coke on my monitor.
[User Picture]From: [info]rpkrajewski
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 7:55 AM (UTC)

Somewhat Ironic

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I use a Mac at home (since 1993). I've mostly hacked on Windows for most of my professional life, although I've done a lot of server-side Unix in the past five years. And right now I'm typing this on a PC running Red Hat. The current job is mostly about server software written in Java, but I've learned a little about GNOME and other desktop Linux stuff, if only to smooth the development process.

Anyway, I was going to send you mail about a pretty minor bug which I assume isn't xscreensaver's fault (unhandled message messages just before xscreensaver kicks in, after vnc.so is enabled in XFree86 4.x).

I also looked at Gronk (just out of curiosity). I was going to suggest a future direction for it, should anybody take it up, is to turn it into a Icecast/Shoutcast and daap (iTunes remote access) server that doesn't rely on any sound access or locally available player. The main problem with daap (beside the fact that Apple seems to change it any time they want) is that iTunes doesn't play well with very large music libraries accessed over it. But of course you could still use the Gronk web interface if your local player used the Shoutcast stream.

I would really like to see a first-class non-X graphical Emacs or XEmacs on OS X. (Here on my GNOME desktop, I can't even drag a file from the file browser to Emacs. That works under Windows !) There used to be a NextStep-hacked Emacs, but I never got a chance to use it (I had a NeXT cube at Lotus for a while) and nobody ever bothered bringing it into OS X.
[User Picture]From: [info]packetslave
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 8:56 AM (UTC)

Re: Somewhat Ironic

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[User Picture]From: [info]zenmonkeykstop
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 7:57 AM (UTC)

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I give it a month.
[User Picture]From: [info]fantasygoat
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 11:43 AM (UTC)

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The only thing I give a month is his still using the Linux box for much of anything. I'm quite surprised it took this long - the frustration was quite palatable over the years.
[User Picture]From: [info]dormando
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 8:23 AM (UTC)

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Now you have to buy one for your girlfriend, and "accessorize" (I can't spell airhead words) your mac, so it "looks right"! You'll feel metro tendencies soon enough.

(No, I'm not alluding that linux makes your balls puff up)
[User Picture]From: [info]en_ki
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 8:31 AM (UTC)

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Mmm... testicular cancer.
[User Picture]From: [info]livejournalsux
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 8:24 AM (UTC)

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how about that whole Apple switching to intel thing?
[User Picture]From: [info]zenmonkeykstop
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 8:26 AM (UTC)

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And what's the deal with airline food?
[User Picture]From: [info]simplisticton
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 8:57 AM (UTC)

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Every OS sucks... it's just a matter of what sucks for you personally.

I have a Powerbook work paid for that I love from a hardware perspective, but there are plenty of OS X things that bug me, especially mail.app. I don't have any urge to run out and get a mini or whatever for home use. I'll stick with Linux, warts and all, 'cos it bugs me less.
[User Picture]From: [info]korgmeister
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 9:06 AM (UTC)

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This must have been an interesting decision to make.

"Hmm, which cadre of bitchy, cultike OS-advocates is it going to be least annoying to have pissed off at me?"

Still, I can understand the decision. Only reasons I use Linux instead of Mac is spite (I hate Steve Jobs and 99% of mac users) and cheapassness.
[User Picture]From: [info]flipping_hades
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 10:29 AM (UTC)

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Wow -- screwing your self out of spite for people who don't give a shit about your empty gesture. That, there, is a real winning strategy.
From: [info]kfringe
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 9:46 AM (UTC)

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I'm actually surprised that you lasted this long with Linux. You haven't hit the really scary part yet: other stuff works too. You will, however, be needing to do one little thing before the box can be satisfying.

Remap Caps Lock to Control
[User Picture]From: [info]wfaulk
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 10:22 AM (UTC)

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Last I checked, the CapsLock light on Apple keyboards was hardware controlled, so that if you did swap the mapping, every time you pressed the CapsLock keycap to use a Control chord, the lamp toggled, which was very annoying to me. Even more annoying than having to contort my hand to use the control key. Please tell me that that's changed.
From: [info]kfringe
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 10:00 AM (UTC)

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The other thing that takes just about zero effort is also worthwhile. You probably won't even need those longer cables if you get one.
[User Picture]From: [info]autopope
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 10:21 AM (UTC)

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This happened to me five years ago.

I kept dual-booting with Linux for the first year or so, but gradually ran out of energy.

Two years after that, honesty forced me to admit that I'd switched, and jack in the Linux magazine column. Oh, the ignominy.
From: [info]audiobookworm
Wed, 14-Feb-2007 3:10 PM (UTC)

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yep, dancing on two marriages does not work over the long term, I've had the same experience.....
[User Picture]From: [info]duskwuff
Fri, 10-Jun-2005 10:27 AM (UTC)

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As far as future-direction-of-xscreensaver goes, coding native OS X saver plugins is pretty easy, even if it does involve learning a bit of Objective C.
[User Picture]From: [info]fraveydank
Sun, 12-Jun-2005 2:33 PM (UTC)

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And Objective C is fantastic. I'll take it over that patchwork they call C++ any day (and with Objective C++, you can mix the two, if you're into that sort of thing). It's gotten to the point that I'm using Obj-C on my Linux projects when it's available (even without the STL or NextStep) on the host GCC.
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