As noted in a previous blog post, I am now an owner of the latest (as of this writing) 15″ MacBook Pro, the 2.66GHz model, and, let me tell you, it’s a superb laptop. (I don’t think I’ve gotten this excited since I took home my Wii.) I wanted to go in-depth on each thing I’ve done with it, so instead of covering the same topics twice, I decided to summarize my experience here, and write in-depth in other posts instead.
How has my experience been overall? OSX is not flawless, but it’s brilliant. For example, I’m constantly switching from Ctrl+Tab to Cmd+Tab to Cmd+` to Ctrl+A Ctrl+A depending on the application I’m using. (Ctrl+Tab for tab switching, Cmd+Tab for app switching, Cmd+` for window-in-an-app switching, and Ctrl+A Ctrl+A for terminal screen switching.) Another example is Finder. The fact that the Open dialog looks exactly like, and yet is different from, other Finder dialogs makes me do summersaults in my head when I try to do something in Open that I did in Finder or vice-versa. The library of software for OSX is lacking, but I supplement it with Prefix (more on that later). The hardware is sheer awesome, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to leave it now. Continue reading →
A recent comment in a previous post (I have readers!?) reminded me to update my blog with the latest on Gentoo for Pandora.
First of all, some good news: our first truly working, truly stable release is out, v0.0.3.
Besides that, though, we’ve decided to work Gentoo Embedded into our strategy. viridior and I had a chat over Skype, and viridior pointed out that our project really isn’t replaced, because Gentoo Embedded never plans (or doesn’t appear to be planning) to provide support for further additions beyond a simple stage3 build. Indeed, Gentoo Embedded has a broad focus: bring Gentoo to embedded platforms. Our focus will be on the Pandora, so we’ll be able to provide more “specialized” documentation and support through our project.
Also, another thing viridior pointed out is Gentoo Embedded is more or less doing us a favor by taking the responsibility of the base variants (the images we use to build all the other images) off our shoulders. All we’ll have to do is grab the latest stage3 and we’re already halfway home. 😉
So, all thanks to viridior, I’m back on my feet, and the project continues to move along!
It’s been a year since my opinion has changed from PC’s to Mac’s, hardware-wise. Now it’s time for my opinions to take physical form. Apple’s keynote presentation at WWDC today has convinced me that now is the best time to buy a MacBook Pro. What are my reasons? Continue reading →
There’s an official Gentoo project caleld Gentoo Embedded which is supposed to handle porting Gentoo to various embedded systems. When viridior and I started Gentoo for Pandora, they were not handling armv7a processors (yet), so our project filled in a gap .
However, I’ve been recently informed that Gentoo Embedded will receive a BeagleBoard before too long, and they’ll use their tool called “autobuild” to generate up-to-date stage3’s on a regular basis. This is essentially what viridior and I have been working towards.
When another group of people come along and completely invalidate the reasons you’ve been working on a project for 4+ months and you think is going to benefit a lot of people long-term, you’re pretty much done. I’m going to run through the motions of releasing our latest 0.0.3-rc5 image, but after that we’ll have to move on and figure out what we can add that Gentoo Embedded hasn’t already done. Continue reading →
I wish I had more nice here’s-how-to sort of blog posts. I also wish my desktop had managed to stick around until it could be considered reasonable to buy a MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, nothing is going exactly how I want it to, for the most part.
My desktop began showing odd symptoms last summer. The hard-drive would make clicking noises for a moment, the sort it makes when it turns on and off, but everything would work fine. I did get a little worried when fsck reported errors, but it fixed them and I didn’t have any problems since… Continue reading →
My Humble Corner 