Carbon falls sick
My Vaio developed some power supply problems. I’m not sure of the cause, but the freezing up and not recharging got the better of me. The in-patient procedure at Sony will take 10 business days, with the holiday season, we’re talking a month of absence.
I can’t imagine even one day without a computer, so I went an ordered a new one.
Three days with Only12
Meanwhile, I spent three days bound to Only12, technically known as a 12″ G4 MacBook. To cut a long story short, evolution wise, I lack the specific gene that will make me appreciate the Mac.
There’s beauty in simplicity and annoyance in dumbing down, and for me, the iPod is one and the MacBook is the other. I just keep bumping my head against its metal casing.
I don’t want it to suspend whenever I close the lid, but I do want it to hibernate before packing up for an hour of non-use. When hunting for WiFi, I want to see the signal strength and encryption. I pay dearly for the EVDO service, which I can’t use for lack of a PCMCIA port.
Idiotically, I keep minimizing windows, and getting annoyed when I have to fish for them in the dock. And I can’t get the handle on switching tabs, as opposed to switching windows, as opposed to switching applications. Life is easier with just tabs and apps.
Maybe one day I’ll figure out how to use the Finder with the keyboard, right now I just expect it to work like a Web browser. A habit I picked from Windows (IE) and Linux (Konqueror). There’s more, but I’m sounding like a broken record, so let’s move on.
Dressed for the Web
Without a development environment, I spent most of the time doing Web related stuff. E-mails, IM, blogging, reading, researching, even more reading, editing documents, updating Wikis. Surprising how much work happens inside the browser.
For good measures, I switched between Camino and Flock. (I gave up on Safari a long time ago, using Safari with GMail is as pleasent as using Lynx) Seem that Flock is a bit rough around the edges, Camino feels more responsive.
Switching computers is not transparent, you need to plan for it in advance. Without the cookies and stored passwords, I couldn’t do half the stuff I normally do. I keep different passwords for different sites, with auto-login for some. I got to feel the pain of no single sign-on.
I also realized that you don’t learn the browser, the browser learns you.
Carbon’s younger brother
Then the new Vaio arrived. What a difference six months make.
True to Moore’s law. The old Vaio was top of the line, the new Vaio is one configuration short of the top. That’s $300 less, but with a nice boost in performance, going from 1.8GHz to 2GHz, double the cache, bigger harddrive and twice the pre-installed RAM.
Drivers coming of age. I got the old Vaio when Duo Cores with the new Intel chipset just hit the market. A month with many long nights later, I finally cracked the code to the right combination of video, sound and WiFi patches to make it all work. Even then, suspend/resume was more like suspend/reboot, and every other kernel update would throw things off balance.
The new Vaio I got up and running in an hour, with all drivers, suspend, hibernate, and the magic of Beryl. The Sony FN keys are on leave of absence for a while, I’ll deal with those later. And I have to admit it wasn’t user friendly. Fedora got the right video/sound setup, but doesn’t ship with the WiFi driver, or the audio/video codecs. Those are all super easy to ‌install … if you know where to look.
Moving around. Now generally, and this is going back to my Windows roots, I reserve hardware upgrades for my worst enemies. “Easy upgrade” is about a week worth of reconstructing registry tweaks and copying files from odd places.
Linux doesn’t work that way. You just suck the home, etc, lib/mysql and other choice directories from the old machine to the new one, and you’re good to go. Given the size of my music collection, that took two separate runs to copy everything, exactly what rsync is good for.
I’m now thinking frequent upgrades are a good thing. Either way, it feels good to be back on the Linux horse.
Picture by Xerones