elliotths blog: Desktop Linux suckage: wheres our Steve Jobs?.
Linux developers are starting to realise that they need a “Steve Jobs” to help steer them in the right direction for graphics and interfaces.
Recently, i’ve started reading comic books on my Mac. I find that my portrait monitor really helps for this, because of being a better “fit” in terms of aspect ratio.
The program i use to view the comics is called Comical. It hasn’t been touched since 2006, but it has a Windows, Mac and the source.
Unlike x5315, I have an Intel Mac which means I can run VMware Fusion, which is VMware’s Mac virtualisation software catered in particular to be user friendly for people who want to run Windows apps on their Mac without using Bootcamp. I decided to run some benchmarks - not between VMware Fusion and my MacBook, but between two Linux virtual machines inside Fusion - using different architectures, and came to some surprising results.
I love dual monitors. I love the increased productivity they give me; not having to cmd+tab or exposé between windows when I’m looking something up, or being able to keep my eye on IRC or an IM conversation simply by flicking my eyes across rather than having to distract myself with changing windows. I also love the increased productivity using a Mac gives me; the OS really is a joy to use day to day - it’s functional, elegant, fun, and relaxing: I don’t find myself ever fighting with the operating system and its applications like I do with Linux, and sometimes Windows.
You can probably guess what comes next.
Recently i tried it. It works great. I even created the new logo using GIMP over the University network. Now, many people might think “What’s the point? You can install GIMP on Mac anyway”.
Well my answer is that for the few of us that are still PPC, some x11 apps don’t work, also sometimes we just don’t have enough processing power to do the task as well as all our other activities.
The command in an SSH terminal to do X Forwarding is:
ssh -X <username>@<hostname>
Since everything is going over SSH, it’s all encrypted as well.
I’ll answer the latter part first. Because it sucks.
Right, now to the FireWire Networking.
FireWire can be used to network two computers together. But what many people don’t know is the advantages of ZeroConf. Basically, this gives a sort of local domain name. For example, x5315-laptop.local.
But it gets even better than that. You can daisy chain the FireWire nodes together. This is shown in my setup.
My large PowerBook is the Root Node. From this i have a FireWire cable going to my PowerMac. Then one leaving the PowerMac to the Hackintosh. Then one leaving the Hackintosh to the little PowerBook. What’s even better, is that all of these are transitive. So my little PowerBook can access the services on my large PowerBook. In fact, all Nodes see all the other Nodes.
Transferring files from the little PowerBook to the big PowerBook and from the PowerMac to the big PowerBook get pretty much the same bandwidth.
Of course, all TCP/IP and UDP services work across the network. For example AFP, SSH and VNC.
Although the bandwidth isn’t as fast as Gigabit ethernet. It’s still fast enough to play a DVD over the network or to move the iPhone SDK around.
Overall, everyone should know about FireWire networking. It’s cheaper than buying switches, and you can use any Mac, some Linux Machines and Windows XP machines.
One of my best finds in a long time.