Apple Macbook or Dell Inspiron 1520 for Ubuntu ? - Page 2

ABF, you actually need to use OSX for a week or so to realize how rock solid stabile it is. Last week was a crazy work week for me and I never had a chance to boot into Linux. Just threw the machine into suspend with all my apps running every night... We're talking Textmate, Mongrel web server, gimp, opera, firefox, vmware fusion with winxp for IE6 testing, and a few other apps. The machine never slowed down or locked up. And it was never turned off. I've never had that kind of stability with even linux. forget windows.

The main issues I have with OSX have to do with that crappy aqua theme, bad font rendering(I don't use anti-aliased fonts), horrible file manager(finder), terrible mouse accelleration, and the fact that every freaking aqua app is pay-for. Once you hit command line things get MUCH better. It's basically linux at that point. The compositing engine (quartz?) is so much better than anything linux has now. It doesn't do all that much, but what it does do, it does perfectly. I could only dream for beryl or compiz to be as stable.

The other thing is OSX supports bluetooth and firefire SOOOO much better than linux. So if you do video editing or audio recording you're much better off with OSX at this point.

My point is that I think the two OS' compliment each other very well, even if they both share a common foundation. Windows, on the other hand, is only good for games and outlook, imo.

i do have experience w/ macs... via school (my hs was exclusively mac), and via friends (my best friend and gf both have macs...ibook and macbook respectively) so i am well aware of what macs can and cant do. i am still confused as why the hell did the IT peoples @ my school installed OSX 10.3 on G3 iMacs (yup..the colored ones) b/c it was slow beyond all hell, but on more recent computers its all good (at least as far as most lag is concerned).

i have pretty good stability with PCLOS2007 on my Thinkpad T23, I use suspend all the time and i might only need to restart once about every week or 2. Vista on my Uniwill on the other hand can't suspend 2 out of 3 times (XP suspended 9 out of 10). I could never get linux to suspend on my uniwill.

But back to the original topic @ hand. Dell tech support is really decent at least in my experience, you get more hardware for the money, and since Dell itself supports Ubuntu on that system you know it will work fine. So I really see no reason not to get a dell, well, except for maybe they make you pay for a Vista license (its ok, apple makes you buy osx...so sorta cancels each other out)

Dang I am going to do more ripping on Mac in this thread than I have done in my entire existance on this board

BT I will be the first to admit Mac is dang solid. Of course so is my workstation. I easily run it for weeks at a time with no problem. I haven't lately for a variety of reasons, but earlier this year it was flat out common for it to be doing so. I can get just as much stability out of linux as I can on a mac, and better performance. The trade off here though is that it takes more tweaking in Linux to get both, and mac does come out of the box ready for decent performance and good stability.



e17 does everything I have seen in Mac OS, and without bogging down my 3D card if I actually cared about that Mac OS uses 3D acceleration for some of its rendering supposedly, e17 doesn't with its built in effects. You CAN do facier stuff with the video card, and still get better performance in my experience with e17 in doing that to be honest, though I don't do it for several reasons myself.


Gotta call you on that one BT. Bluetooth I won't speak on, firewire support in linux is dang good. What is not dang good is a lack of drivers for some of the devices attached to firewire. I actually have MUCH less problems with doing ieee1394 ethernet on my linux box than my mac box for example. Same with HD issues.


While I will put it in different words, I think we will end up saying the same thing. Linux is GREAT for people that want choice and flexibility at the possible expense of ease of initial setup(That really depends on how closely a distro matches your needs nowadays to be honest). It is also great for a severe LACK of tie in. The fact I can buy a Mac, and have been able to for some time, and run linux on it is proof of this, or I can run it on my custom built workstation.

Mac OS on the other hand is much more mainstream, restricting choice but as a result are able to deliver a strong platform due to limiting the choice. It is kinda like using restrictions as a crutch to help you maintain a stable platform. I am NOT saying this is a bad thing mind you, just that it is completely possible to have stability with more choice, but there is a tradeoff (For those familiar with any management, the triangle of time, money, and quality, you can have any of the two, but not all three)

Windows I agree, the only thing it HAD going for it were games, and Vista has shot itself in the foot for that IMO.

Seablade

Sea:
Far-Star:~ Chris$ locate hdiutil
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DiskImages.framework/Versions/A/Resources/agent-defaults/hdiutil.plist
/usr/bin/hdiutil
/usr/share/man/man1/hdiutil.1
/usr/share/zsh/4.2.3/functions/_hdiutil
Far-Star:~ Chris$

What version of OS X are you running?

Seablade

10.4.10 but I've used hdiutil all the way back in Panther.

Just confirming. Apparently the placement is just different for some reason. libcdio is expecting it in /usr/sbin instead of /usr/bin.

A symbolic links fixes it, but I am always cautious about that as it seems bad security practice. Oh well I got other things to fix first, like finding out what is still open on it for reading that is preventing it from ejecting.

I miss my mount commands on linux....

Seablade and Seablaede
The Ashrim

If you decide to go this route, there is a version of ELive under development for the Macbook apparently.... http://www.elivecd.org/gb/Download/MacBook/ I can't speak for the status of it, elive in genreeal is a good distro for PCs though in my experience. The other thing is ELive And Open Office sounds like it will satisfy most of your demands out of the box for the dell as well. Video Editing unfortunatly IMO is the shortcoming of Linux right now. WHile I can list off half a dozen programs(And just did in another thread) for audio editing, video editing there are a few programs, and none I would qualify as being a good replacement for either iMovie or for Final Cut at this stage in the game unfortuantly. If you DO decide to go with it, Kino is one to look at, or for something a bit more powerful(And confusing) Cinelerra. Both of these come in the ELive distro. The advantage of doing the Macbook/Elive route is a dual boot setup will allow you to continue to use iMovie if you can't find something to replace it. It is FAR from Ideal I know, but may be a good choice. In as far as supporting video formats.... Not sure I agree there are problems. There are problems in as far as people not WANTing linux to support the format, but most of the common ones are all supported now courtesy of FFMPEG, this includes the containers of AVI, MOV, and WMV, as well as the codecs for MPEG-4, h.264, MPEG-2, WMV(1,2, or 3 now), etc. While in some cases it may provide better support to install the win32codecs package which runs many video formats based off the binary windows 32 codecs, Linux now has native support for pretty much anything in there with ffmpeg. It also has better support for things like the MKV (Matroska Video) container which is a hands down MUCH better container than just about anything out there for video, and better support in general for the more open formats(OGG, FLAC, etc for audio in example) Seablade

Quicktime .MOV files are just a container format. The format can be used on Linux, at least for playback with no problem. I don't know about editing software support for it. The codec inside will likely cause the most problems, but most common codecs used by Quicktime can be used. Seablade

yes you can. you need ffmpeg package installed and mplayer should pretty much get you started as far as playback is concerned. Cinerella will edit .mov files.


side rant: what the hell is the point of quicktime and realplayer formats anyway. they are very unpopular, don't have much going for them in terms of performance and compatibility, so why are they even there?

.MOV containers are not all that unpopular, primarily because they are supported across platform with little work. Particularly in artistic fields you will find MOV a LOT. Real, is still making an effort to succeed with things like Rhapsody. Past that I don't have much to say on the,. Seablade

yes x86 is easier. hell, even x86_64 has some concerns. why are you trying to install gnash when you can just use normal adobe flash (err..can you on pcc)... bot how does this matter in this thread since both macbook and 1520 are x86.

that said, that error seems as something you get if you dont have a compiler installed. to resolve that issue in ubuntu you gotta have the build-essential package installed.

there are entire projects dedicated to macbook linux, so i am sure you will be alright.

as for gnash, yeah never used linux on pcc to had no clue, know thats the case for x86_64 though, but either by way of chrooting or installing 32-bit libs one can simply install a 32-bit browser and thus x86 plugins as java and flash (which is what i have going on right now, running ubuntu x86-64 but using 32-bit swiftfox)

There are, I believe, open source implementations of Java you can use now, I don't remember exactly what I did for Java on x86_64, I believe I may have just isntalled the 32 bit version and ran it without chrooting. I know I did that for flash and firefox.

But that was on gentoo, not sure how easy it is to do on Ubuntu. At any rate as ABF mentioned, your problem seems to be that you don't have a compiler installed. Once you do that you should be able to compile gnash, which should provide up to Flash 7 support.

IN as far as Macbooks, eh 2 Gig will be fine for most things certainly. As people move to HD video editing etc it won't be quite so good unfortunatly, and programs these days are becoming more and more bloated to take more ram, so eventually you will find it not enough.

To give an example, I got my powerbook with 512 MB of ram, and that was all it had for several years. I recently added another Gig, but to be honest that was because I needed a speed boost in doing video editing for my portfolio as I was in a car driving down to a week of interviews So really I could keep going on 512 if I needed, especially if I was running LInux and e17 instead of Mac OS X IMO.

My workstation still only has a gig of ram running Linux and e17, I do a fair amount of audio editing on it as that is my work, and I have had no problems. I will be upgrading it soon I think though and likely adding a bit more primarily for longevity.

So short answer, yes I think for most people a mackbook with 2 gigs of ram will be fine. In as far as waiting for the Santa Rose iterations, eh to each their own. With Mac you can usually end up waiting for something or other for a good while if you keep waiting for the next best thing, so the question becomes how much of a difference will that next best thing be for you.

I don't own a Macbook myself, I got one for my wife but she keeps it in Mac OS X (Convert from Windows so I can't speak much on Linux on it unfortunatly, BT I believe can speak more for that than me. I have to get a new notebook here in a short period of time and unfortunatly just because I am poor right now I don't think I can afford to get a MBP which would be what I want. And yes, I would be running Linux on it primarily

Seablade