from a newbie: an intel imac

several posts ago, i mentioned getting a macbook pro. well i had that cancelled because i really needed a new computer and couldn't wait for a few more weeks. so instead, i picked up a brand new intel core duo-based iMac.

my imac is an 1.83 ghz, 17" lcd, 1.5gb ram, 160gb sata drive, with frontrow, isight, the mighty mouse, keyboard and a 2.1 harman/kardon sound stick 2.

right now i only have 512mb because the local apple center didn't have a 1gb stick and i was asked to bring the unit back this coming week of the 20th for it. no prob.

right now with only 512mb, i have no complaints. and this coming from a guy who demands more ram. nothing beats, more ram, i know.

this machine is my first mac. i've been a pc user since i was 10. i have been using pcs for 16 years. and this is the first time i have ever powered open a mac. or even touched one.

the white screen booted. and the local tech at the imac store walked me through the registration process. and introduced me to the dock, and stuff.

while i'm not new to unix boxes, the interface was kind of familiar. it was like kde. make a change, and the system would automatically adapt to it. wow. no need to select "apply" it just worked.

the mighty mouse is another device that took some getting used to. i'm used to feel the buttons on my mouse. here i had to adjust to the fact that all i needed to do was move the mouse to click. and plus the fact that i have at least 5 buttons all could be programmed to do a specific task.

wow.

when i brought the unit home and got it out of the box, all i had to do was plug the unit in, configure my pppoe stuff and off it went. of course it was the first time in years i turned to the help menu to figure things out. but yes it did work on the first try. all i needed was to put my user name and password for the dsl modem and off it went. all systems go.

now, if you're expecting to start working right away you'll probably could. osx has the browsers, a copy of office test drive, ilife and all the neat stuff. but being me, i was looking for xcode, particularly gcc. now i'm sure more mac users don't need gcc. thats fine. so i went to apple's developer center. being already a registered user long before i got the mac, i logged in and fetched xcode. ok, its an 800mb download, no big right? in this day and age of broadband internet, thats nothing. hell pirates on the net can fetch gigabytes of stolen movies with today's tech.

now, apple is great in offering xcode 2.2 as a download but they could at least provide a torrent file or at least enable people to resume download if they get cut off. i had to restart my download at least 5 times. i'm sure a lot of people would love to develop using xcode for the mac, if they could have the free development tools with less trouble.

now while downloading i was playing with the stuff. truly, osx just gets you to start working on your office, or personal stuff as soon as you plug in the unit and log in. you can't beat that kind of service. it just works.

i installed my camino browser, downloaded adobe acrobat reader (osx already has a pdf viewer and a browser) but i prefer my apps over the default stuff that goes with osx but for most users, everything just works on the fly--- flash, pdf viewer, java, python, vim, etc.

performance. i haven't ran any benchmarks on this machine. but at 512mb, i've yet to experience a system slowdown. or a chappy mp3 playback. i don't know about any rosetta stuff if any of my apps are working by running through rosetta. my browser, the camino is already universal binary. and ilife is already universal. so i really wouldn't know. but so far, i'm very very happy with its performance. and i expect better as the ram gets bigger this coming week.

there was a slight hitch though. i've noted in two incidence that the keyboard stopped working. i was merely browsing. what i did was remove and reattach the keyboard and it worked. so far thats my biggest complaint. and there is also that slow loading of a disc, which to me seemed to take longer than in the windows world. i don't know. it was just an impression, never actually timed it.

the superdrive without an eject button does take getting used to. coming from the pc world, our optical drives have buttons outside for physical eject.

another stuff that took a bit of getting used to is installing apps. to me the dmg thing is like mounting an iso image in linux--- via loop back but without the commandline stuff. i don't know how osx does it or if it does something similar. but its a good way of doing things.

i also miss wget, and other normal tools i'd have running on linux from the get go. but since this machine is more geared towards the general user, i'm sure apple didn't feel the need to include them as default stuff.

overall, being a newbie in the macworld, wow it blew me away. i have a windows laptop and a linux box at home. i'm utterly convinced that i'd be buying macs for my desktops and notebooks for years to come and that linux for me will be for my business server space. i love my mac. seriously. it just works.

war journal 006

to be honest i was going out of my mind on how to get the scroll to work on gentoo linux.

stupid me couldn't be bothered to google. eventually i did. it must have been hours.

when in doubt. google it. seriously.

anyway add these simple lines to your xorg config. simply look for the mouse section... and copy the lines below and scroll will be enabled after restarting X.

Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "Auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Buttons" "5"


last post i mentioned that i'd go into the home networking in greater detail. turns out that shorewall, now shoreline is a much more complex beast from the last time i played with it.

i suggest reading and following the instructions from gentoo's home router guide.

but my little change comes with the masquerader and firewalling features of shorewall.

so i emerged shorewall... then after playing with the configuration files... told me i needed to compile ipv6 with the kernel. so i modified make.conf... and included ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" then did an

emerge sync && emerge gentoo-sources

to get the latest stuff.

then after fetchign the sources, symlinked the new kernel directory to /usr/src/linux, copied the old .config to the new directory and added the ipv6 packages.

i was too lazy to read other stuff... and while the kernel was compiling, did an:

emerge -u --fetchonly world && emerge -u world

to update my system. turned out that i needed to make some changes to my net work config at /etc/conf.d/net --- because the new pppoe stuff had a more modular convention that threw away the old stuff.

when it was done, i rebooted, and the system was back online.

then i played with shorewall for the firewalling settings.

but i seem to have been locked out of the internet. so i turned it off.

oh well, i'm tired so i gave up on it... for the time being.

after getting the firewall to run, i'm considering migrating from my 6.8.x xorg-x11 and building modular xorg-x11... but after reading the gentoo modular migration how to it seemed it to be a dangerous transition.

war journal 005

gentoo on my amd64 machine really rocks.

seriously.

i was emerging kdelibs and serveral other stuff last night while playing a rented star wars ep3 dvd. and the machine had a load average between 2.0 and 3.0.

with 1gb of ram, the machine barely scratched the swap.

the machine was clearly responsive, no lags of any kind while playing the dvd and even running firefox on the side.

running windows xp on the same machine wouldn't give you the same quick response. i attribute it of course to the lack of 64-bit support on xp, as well as the fact i had compiled the entire system on 64-bit gentoo. and linux kernel's better memory management over windows.

i know this isn't a scientific benchmark... far from it! its just a comparison of user experience. more on the "feely" side of things. still at the end of the day... sometimes thats just as important.

more on the home networking stuff i've been building as well as getting the bloody scroll on x to work on the next blog.

war journal 004

so i took a break. a long one in building gentoo on my centrino-based notebook.

it just wasn't viable enough to do on only 256mb ram--- and 64 mb of it shared video.

ram matters. more of it the better.

anyway, i got a dsl connection for the house and started setting up an operation here. cleaned up the old library and turned it into my little home-office with some interesting plans for it.

now, with the adsl connection, i plugged in my gentoo linux.

sometimes, not compiling everything in the kernel is a good thing. the kernel isn't bloated with stuff i'll never use, hence, i normally never turn them on. and i avoid modules. in this case that backfired. you see, i never did emerge adsl, pppoe packages. not even compiled them in the kernel. hence, having the new adsl connection, i had no way of connecting to the internet to emerge packages.

i was forced to rebuild the gentoo system.

no problem. its not production. more experimental in nature. i quickly plugged in an old ide 40gb drive and uploaded data to it. and set about to rebuild gentoo. i booted into the new system and less than 8 hours later ( i couldn't give you the exact number because i slept through most of it and when i awoke, portage had stopped on an error when it reached 30 packages out of 189, that was 4 am). by 10am the following morning, xorg-x11+gnome was built and working.

a quick edit of the xorg.conf gave me 1024x768 resolution and my scroll mouse working properly.

it was time to get some stuff in. sure this would be used for application/web development but i still wanted officeorg installed and i did.

because sun-sdk (java 5) is masked--- i did a minor hack. i went and downloaded sun java 5 from sun and extracted it to a local directory and copied the entire thing as root to my /usr dir. java 5 is working on my machine.

as this was happening i was building firefox. ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" emerge =mozilla-firefox-1.5.0.1-r1

it of course worked. sort of. because after reading the amd64 how to, i should have built from binary to take advantage of flash. may be i'll find some other way around it.

as i'm writing this, i'm compiling mplayer to play some videos and dvds. (off topic: though i don't mind playing with mplayer, it does peeve that for me to watch my legitimately owned dvds in linux, in any distro, i have to go through hell, talk about a consumer right)

i love my amd64 and i love gentoo on it. i'll be doing some stuff with this machine. the fun part of gentoo is building things from scratch and learning about interesting hacks. its fun.

gentoo linux on amd64 is the ultimate experimental car. sometimes you get to play with it in productive ways. when this is done, i'm sure it will be one powerful system. and worth the trouble building.

Setting the Record Straight: Intel Macs

As I'm wrting this, I'm waiting for my macbook pro to be delivered. Now everyone's probably read one or two or three articles on how fast the new Macs are compared to their Power-processor siblings. Even weird comments that the new Macs may be more vulnerable to viruses now that they've transitioned to Intel. Its time to dispel all this!


What makes a computer a computer? You could probably say its the processor, stupid! well that may have been true in the past, (and i use may in the heaviest sense) but today's screaming babies, require a symphony of all the parts--- ram, hard drive, system bus i/o, graphics card and Operating System to produce a well built machine. yet we still get stuck with the ghz question. every machine with a faster clock speed is deemed good. yet we have seen benchmarks of amd64s out pacing intel p4s.


lets look at the mac, because thats what we've set out to do. is it really conceivable that the G5s are slow? what was all that hoopla that the g5 was the best processor on the planet (at least when it was born having won a microprocessor award way back when). Yet we have benchmarks from macworld and from so many others that say the dual-core cpus of the new iMacs best or at the least equal the performance of the single core G5 (a 64-bit machine).


its hard to compare apples-to-apples when Core Duo is a 32-bit, dual core processor and the G5 is a 64-bit, single core machine (on the iMac). Not to mention, Core Duo is x86 and G5 is PowerPC. they're two very distinct species.


We can also argue that OSX for the G5 was compiled to run both 32-bit and 64-bit code while for OSX for x86 (at least the core duo version) was compiled with dual-core and 32-bit code. If you've ever tried to build your own Operating System i.e. compiled Gentoo Linux on multiple platforms (AMD64 and Intel) you would know that you can optimize for each distinct processor family using the C compiler you've got. Hence that benchmarks comparing the two machines are not very scientific.


That said, we can argue that user perception is always superior. After all, does the average faithful care if you have better floating point performance on one processor than the other or that you run on an Intel rather than a PowerPC? Steve Jobs said it in last year's developer conferrence (2005), it's OSX that people love. Its what Mac users love about their macs. the Hardware underneath makes it possible for Apple to give the user a distinct, powerful, user experience because they don't have to worry that multiple hardware must work with OSX like Microsoft does.


[off topic: Which leads to the question whether OSX will ever run on other intel machines. it probably wouldn't because the cost of maintaining code for different drivers would drive apple to be like microsoft. ]


So what do these benchmark tell us? That the Core Duo machine will equal or slightly exceed the performance of a single core G5, at least in raw speed. hence that iMac G5 you bought before christmas, is still good and will still do the job, two years down the road. That Quad Mac is still the fastest kid on the block. That these new machines, will just give life to people who need new mobile macs and that the good stuff is yet to come. OSX still rules.


As for viruses and such now that OSX has moved to Intel, viruses, trojans and so many other security breaches are Operating System-level problems. They're vulnerabilities in Windows, in Linux, in Unix and yes, OSX. It got nothing to do with which processor your OS is running on.


People write in windows viruses and such because a) a lot of machines are on windows so more people have access to them, hence the probability of more trash, b) windows was never designed for the network in the first place so security wasn't a major issue that they had to address which they are doing so only now, c) its much more difficult but not impossible to exploit vulnerabilities in Unixes like Linux and OSX and when we say vulnerabilities we're not limiting ourselves to operating system/kernel level flaws but applications as well (which should be separated btw).


i ordered the new macbook pro because i need a new machine, a unix based machine that will let me do my work in peace and in full power as well as have good multimedia features like iTunes, which gentoo doesn't have sadly. people who need new machines now would probably get them but those who can wait probably should for the better toys sure to come (we speculate by reading the Intel roadmap which tells us what ought to come in the next few months).


So what does Intel on Macs mean for us ordinary people? its OSX that makes the difference. so unless you buy a Mac, on Intel or Power--- nothing.