I think hanging around the Apple Store while looking at Apple TV and being enticed by the shiny world of Apple must have got back to my old PC laptop and it has decided to throw a huge strop. I must admit that I can see why people end up going down the Apple route – I am not including the traditional Apple Mac user community where applications like publishing and music production on the Mac were best of breed (at the time anyway) – since the way Apple have marketed there products as “lifestyle” items making them all bright and shiny and “simple to use”. The simple to use fits well with the phenomenal success of the Dummies series of books and there ilk. People tend to not have the time, nor the patience, to find out how things work but tend to just want to pick something up and use it. Passing the responsibility of making things work to someone else is not really anything new or revolutionary but in the world of personal computing there has, up until recently, been a level of knowledge required to really get the best out of it. I think that is still the case but you can get by without much knowledge of the system at all today.

The thing that got me though, was the neat package and the slick design. Since Gail has decided that the HP that I bought during the Christmas holiday last year is her machine, I have been on the lookout for a new laptop for me. The whole laptop in the living room thing has really taken hold in our home and as the capability of laptops has increased as the price has come down they really start to make sense as a main home machine. The statistics back this up since home laptop sales now out strip desktops but I still think for real power applications you need a desktop. The new MacBook Pro got my attention especially since it is now possible to run Windows on the machine thanks to the efforts of some determined guys to come up with http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp which is actually being included in the next version of the Apple OS. This had a major appeal since there was now a system capable of doing all the good stuff that Apple still do while running on a stable UNIX underpinning while also now providing the versatility of Windows for those things that are just not available elsewhere. Sounds too good to be true, fantastic. So how much? Took another trip down to http://www.magnummac.co.nz/Branches/Branches.html#Auckland with a few questions. They had been quite helpful when I had been looking for a Kiwi style power connection for my iPod power adapter. They answered the questions with a why would you need to know or even care about that sort of attitude but the one that really got me when asking about the soon to be released upgrade to the operating system and whether there was any incentive such as a discount to the upgrade if buying a new laptop now. Apparently not! But it is much cheaper than Microsoft Vista, so there! I am not really into bartering but I have learned since getting here, that it is normal practice and some things are priced with a view to being reduced by at least 10%. You need to ask but it is usually never an issue and in the case of not asking you are pretty much paying too much. I could get this stuff from the local electrical retailers and get at least some discount but I thought I would try the official dealer. There is also the option of the parallel import shops (they don’t call them grey imports over here) as well but the risks are obviously increased if something goes wrong!

I took away the information I had gleaned from the helpful people at Magnum Mac and did a bit of research. It turns out that the “new release” is more like a service pack than a major release and they are pretty regular in the release cycle. At $240 it is not bad for a reasonably feature some OS and it is indeed cheaper than a full (or even an upgrade for that matter) licensed copy of Vista, even at entry level. What they failed to factor in to the comparison is that these “upgrades” are not really more than a service pack and a few add-ons. With a release pretty much each year these $240 service packs add up over the years to pretty well outstrip the cost of Vista by some way. If you want to run Windows on the machine as well you would need to add the cost of a Vista licence anyway so it all adds up. Then there are the “killer” applications. MS Office seems to be one of them! I was beginning to have my doubts about this. It did not help that the laptop itself was top dollar (I guess I can say that now) for comparable hardware (since Apple now use the same Intel processor as the PC community these days) and though it looked good to the eye, I was beginning to see a few issues with the way things are locked into the Apple format. They appear to be a few steps behind the PC community on a number of fronts hardware wise but it all seems to befit the simple to use mime. Time for a rethink!

I have always done the usual stereotypical thing when trying to use Linux as a replacement for Windows in the past but have always run up against some barrier that made the switch back inevitable. It was just not mature enough, but that was then. I thought about the fact that Apple was using essentially a highly customised version UNIX (BSD ish) and that the Linux desktop has come a long way since the mid 90’s when I started playing with around with fips and LILO to get Linux installed on a PC so I decided it was time to give it another go.

I dug out an old machine that I had thrown in the container and tried installing the latest ubuntu distro that had been included on a magazine cover disk. In the UK I would normally have downloaded these things at will but when you are on a metered broadband service as is almost universally the case in NZ (Wellington being the exception) you consider the traffic before committing to multi gigabyte downloads. I had used ubuntu a few times before and have been keeping an eye on them over the past few months in particular. This was release 7.04 and has been appearing on a number of magazine covers recently. The idea of there Long Term Support (LTS) with release versions stable and supported for long enough for larger companies to take notice since one of the issues with Linux in the Enterprise has been long term support. Some companies have managed this well in the past such as Red Hat but it is good to see others stepping up to the plate with this. It seems to be paying off for them since Dell have now decided that ubuntu is the Linux of choice for there Open OS http://www.dell.com/open which may or not be a good thing in the long term but for now it has got to be for the good. I wish them well for having the guts to try this. I know it has been greatly anticipated but I hope people will actually buy the product and support this initiative but I fear it may be doomed to fail once again for a number of reasons. I hope I am wrong.

The difference between my experience with this install and some of my previous efforts has been that this time the ability to get the job done and fix any problems have been relatively easy and quick to sort. I will admit though that there are still issues to be dealt with and had I not been determined to sort this as I went, I may have given up and switched back to Windows. So far so good and I will keep a note of how this turns out. My main issue so far has been getting wireless to work with Linux and the kludge I am using is not ideal but it is working. When I get a new Laptop I think it may be a Dell. (they are not yet selling this option outside the US)