The Tao of Mac – HOWTO/Switch To The Mac

I need to move back to working on laptops as I’ll be doing a bit of travel. Been thinking about switching to a Powerbook, this seems like a good place to start: The Tao of Mac – HOWTO/Switch To The Mac.

Lack of an OSX Openoffice port, it probably the main thing that is holding me back. We use OO in our business, so it would be a pain to be without it. Especially the upcoming 2.0 release. I could of course run Debian/PPC, but that somewhat defeats the purpose. Then there is the NX option from my colo box. I’m not sure if there is a native NX client for OSX. Something to explore.

4 Comments

  1. Richard Parry Said,

    January 24, 2005 @ 9:44 pm

    I’ve sent you this in an email – but here it is, immortalised on the interweb for ever.

    There’s OpenOffice on the Mac, it’s installed on mine. It’s not native, in that it’s not an Aqua/Cocoa app (it uses X – so it looks no better or worse than OO on Linux).

    Win4Lin there is not, but VirtualPC there is, which is considerably better. Think VMWare, but for Power.

    It’s also installed on mine šŸ™‚ Microsoft product, would you believe – they bought the company directly before switching to Power for the next Xbox.

    As far as Linux on power – well, it’s not recommended. Trust me, OSX is the shit – it’s all the love you want from UNIX, but with a decent GUI. Most people OI know who’ve chucked linux on theirs normally revert back ’cause they never use it. With projects like Fink (Debian package manager for OSX) and DarwinPorts (anything you’ve ever wanted, compild from source Gentoo-styule) there’s not a lot a Mac can’t do that Liunux can – and there’s actually some commercial games for Mac too šŸ™‚

    If I just wanted a workstation, no games, there would be no question about what I’d buy – Mac all the way. Having used one as a laptop, and having one as a server, there is just no comparison – everything works so well.

  2. Nicholas Lee Said,

    January 24, 2005 @ 10:36 pm

    How do you find OpenOffice on Mac via X works? Does it stay up to date with regards to the main line? Not being able to play PC games, is actually one of the allures. Personally I still prefer x86 servers. Things like Xen or UML don’t work on PPC, but you have room to run a few Xservers then its probably quite good.

    Looking at the Fink site, it looks like even KDE is ported. Its all making a strong case. How easy is it to upgrade, say the HDD?

  3. Nicholas Lee Said,

    January 25, 2005 @ 10:40 am

    Another thing. What is the battery life like? That's one of the nice things about the Thinkpads, its easy to get up to 8-10 hours battery life.

  4. Richard Parry Said,

    January 27, 2005 @ 2:59 pm

    Battery life is cool, the thinkpads with a centrino chipset can’t be beat tho.

    U/G HDD is really easy, it’s just a standard notebook 2.5″ IDE drive. The hardest it gets is finding some jewelers screwdrivers to undo the screws.

    OpenOffice via X works well. Now, the only real downside is that it’s an X app – meaning, after the pampered beauty of Cocoa/Aqua, it looks rough.

RSS feed for comments on this post