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07/04/2006: "stealing back the revolution, on Independence Day"

So as others have pointed out, (me too) there seems to be a switch on from MacOS X to Ubuntu. (Sadly, Tim O'Reilly can only see the movement in terms of potential for his new book.)

Anyway, Mega-Geeks (of the Mac kind) seem to be switching to Ubuntu, typically on new PC hardware, mostly due to Apple's increasing pro-DRM / anti-FOSS stance.

I did it the other way.

I just "upgraded" my 12" PowerBook to Ubuntu 6.06, and I did it over a (somewhat slow) hotel network A free hotel network. (Are you listening, Wayport?)

It actually only took about 40 minutes for the CD-ROM to load and blow new bits onto my 80GB hard drive. When it was done (and I had added several more packages (emacs, xastir, EasyUbuntu), I've used less than 3GB for various files, and another 3GB for "swap".

In terms of memory, the machine has been up 2.5 hours since its most recent reboot (I've been grinding on making the Broadcom wireless (nee: "Airport") driver work), and has used less than 0.25GGB of memory. This while emacs (the X version), Thunderbird, Firefox and Gnome are all running, leaving me with right around 1GB of free memory for other applications to use.

MacOS X can't touch that.

My solution for the wireless driver, after following the instructions found here is to pop this little script in /etc/network/if-pre-up.d/:


#!/bin/sh

IWCONFIG=/sbin/iwconfig
if [ "eth1" == $IFACE ]; then
$IWCONFIG $IFACE ap any
fi


Now as soon as I get used to ^C and ^V, rather than %C and %V (% = the "Apple" key, which is bound to "Super" under linux), I'll be set. Oh yah, and I'll need to find a way to make linux crush out DVDs.

Happy Independence Day!