14 Oct 2007
A friend recently asked me for advice on buying a laptop for a college
student. Here’s the advice I gave them: These days laptops from different
companies are all pretty similar. They use roughly the same parts, and are
built in exactly the same Chinese factories. So I would try to figure out
roughly what configuration you wanted, and then shop for the best deal, pretty
much ignoring the manufacturer.
Macintosh vs. Others
The first decision, and the only one where the manufacturer matters, is whether
you want a Macintosh or a non-Macintosh. The benefits of a Mac are:
- Great support if you happen to live near an Apple Store.
- Check if you do by looking here: http://www.apple.com/retail/
- Macs are fashionable.
- Macs can run Apple software in addition to regular Windows software.
- Macs have good resale value. (Although laptops in general are very fragile, so it’s likely that your
laptop will break before you resell it.)
The disadvantages of a Macintosh are:
- About 30% more expensive than other brands, especially if you get the other brands on sale. Macs never go on sale.
- It is more awkward to use a Mac for Windows software than other laptops. This is due to
- The Mac not having a built-in right mouse button.
- You have to go through extra steps to buy and install the Windows operating system.
I currently own a MacBook and I also use a MacBook Pro laptop at work. I
bought the MacBook because I thought it was pretty, and I wanted to experiment
with using Apple software. I like it – it is a good compromise on size,
performance, cost, and so on. I especially like the service I get from the
Apple Store. I live about 2 miles away from the Bellevue Apple Store. I have
had two problems with my Macbook since I bought it:
-
My kids pulled off several of the keys, and even lost three. The Apple Store gave me replacement keys for free, and even put them on the keyboard for me, also for free.
-
The laptop battery stopped working. In this case the Apple Store gave me a new battery ($100 value) free, no questions asked.
I also use a Macbook Pro loaned to me by my work. They give people a choice
between a Macbook Pro and a Leonovo Thinkpad T60. I’d say the split is about
50/50 on which notebook people choose. The Leonovo Thinkpad line, formerly
made by IBM is one of the best “no nonsense business computer” laptop lines.
They have especially good keyboards. The Macbook Pro is much larger than the
Macbook. It is also much heavier. I find both notebooks are good, and I don’t
think the Macbook Pro, at around $2500, is 2.5 times better than the Macbook,
at around $1000. If it were my own money, I would buy the Macbook rather than
the Macbook Pro. As for non-Macintosh laptops, I would look for a laptop with
these features:
-
A good keyboard
-
Built in wireless networking
-
1 GB of RAM
-
A good screen (bright and easy to read.)
-
40 GB hard disk
-
CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive
-
Weight around 4 to 5 pounds.
-
Doesn’t get too hot in use, has a quiet fan.
-
Price around $800 to $1200
If given a choice between several models with different speeds of CPU, I would
choose the cheapest/slowest, because all of the CPUs are really fast these
days. And I would be happy to buy a slightly older laptop model on sale.
Laptops typically are only sold for 6 months, they are then replaced by a
slightly better model. When a model is replaced, it often goes on sale at a
good price. I would consider laptops by pretty much any brand. And I think I
would try to see the laptops in person before buying, as that’s the best way
to judge whether the screen looks good, or the keyboard is comfortable to type
on. One frustrating thing about laptops is that the build quality varies
greatly from model to model, even within the same company. So just because one
model is reliable, doesn’t mean another similar model from the same company
will be reliable. A good web site for laptop review information is
www.notebookreview.com.
14 Oct 2007
Lately I’ve been learning the git source code control system. It’s a
distributed version control system, which means there is no central
repository. It’s especially good for working on multiple branches.
Everyday GIT with 20 Commands
Alas, currently git doesn’t work well on Windows. (Due to many of its utilities being written in a hodge-podge of Unix shell scripts. Pretty lame. If they’d
just used C, Perl, or Python it would have been very easy to port.)
07 Oct 2007
I was a happy Microsoft employee for many years, and as a result, I run
multiple Windows Vista machines at home. My family and I are happy with the
system, especially the Vista Media Center / Xbox 360 combination that we use
as our Digital Video Recorder, so I’m in no hurry to try and replace my
Windows servers with a Linux ones.
This leaves my poor Ubuntu 7.10 Macbook as
something of the odd man out. Over the past few weeks I’ve been learning how
to configure it to work with my mostly Windows network.
Wireless Networking
This worked out-of-the-box. If I recall correctly, I had more trouble
connecting to my home wireless network when running Apple Macintosh OS X 10.4.
Hah, for what it’s worth, my wireless router is a Linksys router that’s
running Linux, so effectively there’s no Windows involved. But I wanted to
mention that wireless networking and Internet connectivity worked well out-of-
the-box.
Connecting to a Windows Vista File Share
Here’s where I ran into my
first problem. It turns out that there are multiple ways of connecting to a
Windows server in Linux/Ubuntu, and they don’t all work reliably. I found that
the UI-based way, using the Ubuntu “Places” menu, didn’t work for me. I could
connect to my windows server, and view the server’s directories, but I
couldn’t reliably read the files. Accessing files was very slow, and reading
large files would always time out.
I was able to access my Windows Vista
shares by following these instructions:
Mounting Windows Shares in Ubuntu <–
allowed me to read my Window shares.
Permission issues with smb and cifs <– allowed me
to delete files on my shares.
The downside of the command-line approach is
that you don’t get a nice icon on your desktop, you have to navigate to
/mnt/myshare/… yourself. But it’s reliable. You can partially work around
this by creating a symbolic link from your desktop to your share. The reason
this is a partial work-around is that Nautilus will think that the resulting
directory is a “local” directory, so it will try to do i/o intensive things
like create preview icons. Oh well.
For what it’s worth, the reliability
problem with the default way of accessing Windows shares seems to be due to
Ubuntu using the older, out-of-date smbfs system
instead of the more modern cifs system. You’d think a hip, happening OS like
Ubuntu would fix this problem, but it’s a long-standing one, so I guess it
hasn’t made it to the top of their priority list yet.
Windows Printing
This was easy.
- First I shared out my printer on my Windows Vista machine. (I never bothered to do that before.)
- Then on my Ubuntu machine I choose the System:Administration:Printing menu item.
- Clicked on the New Printer icon
- Chose “Windows Printer via SAMBA”.
- Fill in the dialog box. Use the handy “verify” button to verify that you’ve done it right.
- Click on Forward and finish the configuration.
I was pleased to find my printer’s model number mentioned in the driver list.
Everything worked the first time.
07 Oct 2007
I’m still getting used to using Ubuntu 7.10 beta on my Macbook.
Unresolved Bugs
- The bottom task-switcher bar sometimes disappears.
- Firefox doesn’t quit cleanly - it always crashes.
- No big deal, this just means that I need to deal with a “do you want to restore” dialog every time Firefox starts up.
- Macbook Audio can’t be muted.
- This appears to be a long-standing Ubuntu / Macbook bug, due to the way Macbook audio muting is implemented. Someone needs to write a driver, and unfortunately audio driver writers don’t seem to care much about Macbook laptops.
Resolved Bugs
- Support for a one-button trackpad
- Choose System:Administration:Synaptic
- Use synaptic to install the mouseemu package to allow F11,F12 buttons to emulate middle and right mouse clicks.
- Phantom button clicks while moving the mouse:
- Choose System:Preferences:Mouse:Touchpad
- Un-check “Tap to Click”.
- Choose Close.
- Problems connecting to Windows Vista Printers and Windows Vista Shares:
- Enable Cleartype-like nice looking anti-aliased fonts:
- Choose System:Preferences:Appearence:Fonts
- Choose “Subpixel Smoothing”.
- Enable Java:
- Choose System:Administration:Synaptic
- Install sun-java6-jdk
- Enable Flash:
- Choose System:Administration:Synaptic,
- install ubuntu-restricted-extras.
- This installs a bunch of useful software that should be in the default Ubuntu install, but isn’t due to political differences between the software authors and the Ubuntu packagers.