Yes, it’s back. Somehow OS X is just more convenient on a current PowerBook than Linux:

• Airport Extreme: While the Linux driver is making good progress, it doesn’t seem to support any encryption yet and therefore a no-go for my pseudo-productive environment here. Anyhow, amazing work. As word spreads quickly, every decent news-site is reporting.
  Fiddling around with my bitchy ZyAir-G200 (or the bitchy driver?) is just annoying. It seems to need the ESSID set twice for some reason. Using KNemo and giving the user permissions to use iwconfig/ifconfig without password (sudo) works smoothly. Anyhow: there’s still that stick dangling at the side of my PB.
• Video out. It’s working, but that involves some tweaking, having the video-adaptor plugged in at boot time and is only capable of mirroring the main screen (Or so I read. Correct me if I’m wrong here).
• My left palm gets well done. Somehow the PB is heating up more running Linux as it does running OS X. Still the fans start more often. Checking my process table confirms that there are no processes out of line. Temperature/Fan-Control needs some tweaking?
• Detection of my external hardrive (IEEE1394/FireWire) isn’t reliable. Sometimes I just can’t get that thing to work.
• Suspend-to-RAM doesn’t work because of a lack of specification from NVidia. Seems it’s currently not possible to shake the GPU awake again. Suspend-to-Disk should work, though. But STR is so much nicer.

Nothing one can’t live without, I guess, but at the moment it kind of bothers me. OS X on the other hand runs pretty well out of the box, the only hardware issue being my scanner, a CanoScan N650U, and the main software issue being Finder (guess the moment everything works just like expected, I just disintegrate). So, while setting up OS X properly, creating filters, importing contacts and bookmarks and looking for applications for this and that, I discovered the following:

• Finder is a bad thing. Why, even Wintendo’s Explorer is manifested usability compared to that thing. Or maybe I just don’t get it. Found a MC clone called muCommander, but hell, there has to be a way to use Finder in a sane way!
• With XiphQT there’s finally ogg-vorbis support for current versions of QuickTime/iTunes. Ogg-streams not supported, though.
• If you want to import OPML into Safari, for example to import your RSS-feeds from Akregator, you might want to use this workaround.
• If you want to transfer your bookmarks from Konqueror to Safari, use this one.
• If you went looking for an app that draws functions, you probably came across EdenGraph a very simple tool for that task. If you then look into your Applications/Utilities you’ll find Grapher, a much more powerful application and a buggy one, too. Found that one by accident today. Who would’ve thought such a raw gem is shipping with Tiger?
• There’s no Gaim for OS X and no, although being based on libgaim, Adium can’t compete. At least when it comes to jabber support. Already wrote about jabber-clients for OS X in this post. If push comes to shove, seem that Gaim builds under OS X so if I get really bored, I might try this.
• The driver supplied by Canon for the CanoScan N650U seems to work with PhotoShop(CS) only. Besides that, there’s TWAIN SANE, a SANE implementation for OS X which seems to access my scanner, for it goes through all the motions using GraphicConverter, but never displays an actual preview/scan. Gimp just gives me a message about some png-related symbols that couldn’t be found. Guess I should really consider buying hardware that will actually run out-of-the-box on my systems. Funny thing is the scanner works flawlessly with linux..
• Found a really nice screensaver via powerbook_blog (de): lotsawater. Looks like, well, lots of water.

Nothing ground-breaking but that post is probably just for safekeeping the links to the appropriate apps anyway.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 7th, 2005 at 22:34 and is filed under GNU/Linux, Hardware, Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.