RLPF.ar

(geek stuff)

On my to-do list for this trip: Get a new machine that will eventually replace my four-year-old MacBook Pro. It's mostly a precaution; I'm not seeing any behavior on my Mac that would suggest impending hardware failure, but... laptop hard drives are more fragile than their desktop counterparts, and usually the first thing to go in a laptop (being the only constantly-moving part). The tight deadline for Affectations is giving me paranoid fantasies of a hard drive crash at any moment, and I certainly wouldn't be able to afford taking unplanned time away from composition to shop, install Linux, configure software etc.

Well, now I don't have to do this in an unplanned way because I have the machine now, mostly set up.

What's working

• Supercollider! The most important thing. I like to build my own from source -- I've been through that a few times before and already made the most likely mistakes, so no particular problems here: install the required packages, check out the latest version from SourceForge, "scons" and "sudo scons install." It launches FAST!
  
  That's the big one. If I couldn't get this working, there would be no point in continuing.

• KXStudio Linux (based on Ubuntu 10.04). Well, mostly working -- good enough for my immediate needs.
  
  In case you haven't heard the rant before -- I do not like Windows. There's a difference between tolerating a working environment (which I can do with Windows) and liking it. I need a UNIX kernel under the hood to like it. KXStudio is also prettier than Windows and highly customizable.
  
  Speaking of Windows: The machine comes with Windows 7. Supposedly this is an improvement over Vista. Maybe so, but it's still sluggish compared to KXStudio. Take booting, for instance. KXStudio boots even faster than my Mac, and the Mac is already faster than previous Windows versions I've used. Windows 7? Still lagging behind. Time from power-up to login is uncomfortably long, and after that, the interface is far less than snappy -- i.e., click on the Start button at bottom left and wait 3-5 seconds before anything happens onscreen. This is a brand-new laptop that hasn't had time for the registry to get bloated, so... huh? The less time I spend there, the better.

What's not working

Ubuntu 10.04 has some bugs. Rather obscene ones, as it happens. I can't go with an earlier version, though, because they don't work with the Intel Core i3 CPU.

• Waking from sleep or hibernation: From everything I read online, this is basically broken in 10.04, unfortunately labeled the Long Term Support version. At best, waking from sleep disables the network (actually, putting it to sleep disables the network, and waking up doesn't reverse that). More likely, the machine becomes unresponsive, calling for a hard reboot.
• WiFi: Ubuntu is supposed to have native support for Atheros WiFi cards. That's buggy. It detects the card and identifies the network, but fails to clear WEP security. Grrrrr. When I have time, I'll try to set up the Windows driver using ndiswrapper.

I can live with it. KXStudio boots so fast that shutting the machine down instead of sleeping is not much of an inconvenience, and I expect to have wired Internet access in most of the places where I'll use the machine. But it gives me a bit more appreciation for people who would rather tolerate Microsoft's corporate evil in exchange for an operating system that works out of the box.

The other win? The $500 price tag, vs. a couple grand for a new MacBook Pro. I could get used to that.