jonathan stegall

Recently, to my great jealousy, my wife bought a MacBook for graduate school. Her previous Windows laptop was on its last legs, so we replaced it. During its good times, she was able to use it to print to and share files with my Windows desktop. I knew it was possible to do this with a Mac as well, and didn’t know how.

Today, I found this tutorial on exactly that. Some of the dialogs are different than Leopard’s, but it is fairly easy to configure both on the Windows side and the Mac side. Note that the RedMon software required the use of a mirror site to download it.

Anyway. She can now happily print to my desktop from her laptop, when it is running Windows. My next related project will be attempting to understand how she can print to my desktop when it is running Ubuntu. Any advice is, of course, most appreciated.

Update: Using this tutorial, I was able to use the MacBook to print to my Ubuntu desktop. The configuration was much easier than it was for Mac to Windows printing.

Fake Steve:

Long story short, I had my people pack up a crate of Apple products for the Shah and send them to him in New York… Bridge-building has to begin somewhere.

That’s what I’m talking about.

So I’ve been successfully using Ubuntu for two weeks now. I have several initial reactions, and other thoughts. I’ll talk about what I don’t like first, and then about what I do like.

What I don’t like

My main issue thus far has been my graphics card. Which, of course, isn’t Ubuntu’s fault at all. I have my graphics card working very well with Ubuntu, so it’s not that my graphics card is junk, either. The issue is that it doesn’t seem to be able to run Beryl, which from what I hear is the eye candy of Ubuntu. I like eye candy, so I’d like to be able to run Beryl.

Other than that, my issues are with the software companies inability or unwillingness to make software that I use compatible with Ubuntu. One of these is iTunes. I love iTunes. I’ve been using Banshee on Ubuntu, and it’s a great player. It has a great interface, great organization, great everything. My main issue with it is that it doesn’t know about my podcast subscriptions, presumably because they’re in an iTunes formatted XML file. So this is a really minor thing.

A related issue is that there is not a 64 bit version of Last.fm for Linux. I’m a huge fan of last.fm, and use it all the time. When I play CDs in iTunes, the last.fm player knows what’s being played and adds it to stuff that I’ve played, and lets me recommend it, or tag it, or whatever. Banshee doesn’t appear to do these things.

Adobe is my other issue. I tried downloading gimpSHOP, just to play around with it and see if I could get used to it enough that I could occasionally avoid rebooting into Windows to use Photoshop. Nope. Can’t do it. I love Photoshop. As much as I sometimes hate it and am frustrated by it, I don’t want to imagine life without it. Flash and Illustrator are also things I couldn’t do without, but I don’t spend an incredible amount of time in either, so it’s a smaller issue for me.

I’m not very impressed with the text editors, and I think the default is better than the several downloadable ones I’ve tried. Sorry about that one. I think Notepad++, which appears to be exclusively Windows, is far better.

I’m sure there is a way to do this properly, that I just haven’t learned. If I’m logged in to my default account, which is not the root, and I double click to open a text file that is only editable by the root user, I’d like to be able to have a graphical equivalent of the sudo Terminal command, so that I could edit said text file without having to use the Terminal. I actually like the Terminal, and find it incredibly powerful, but sometimes I just don’t want to look up commands that I haven’t learned yet, just so that I can edit a text file that Apache uses.

What I do like

Ubuntu is a great operating system. I love almost everything about it. It has a great community on a number of different forums, all of whom were amazing in helping me through my various issues in getting Ubuntu working in the first place. It’s an incredibly powerful system, and it runs very fast for the power that it has.

Mozilla has been amazing for me. I can share my Thunderbird and Firefox profiles between Windows and Ubuntu without the slightest issue. FileZilla (no relation to Mozilla) has also been wonderful, as the beta version of my favorite FTP application runs very smoothly on Ubuntu.

Back to the Adobe thing, for a positive note, Dreamweaver isn’t a big deal for me. I like Dreamweaver, and I plan to use it whenever I have to do web edits in Windows that need a directory tree, but I’ve been using Eclipse, with some plugins for PHP, Python (which I hope to learn soon), JavaScript, CSS, and XHTML, and love it. It exceeds the expectations I had, prior to trying it out.

On a similar note, Apache on Ubuntu is far superior to any implementation of it that I’ve seen on Windows. I’ve tried several of the packages for LAMP development on Windows, and their weirdness is one of the reasons I wanted to try Linux. Initial setup, configuration, and changes on Apache and the development things on top of it are a breeze for me, compared to the way they were on Windows. This also exceeds my expectations.

The overall interface and methodology of Ubuntu is wonderful. I love the themes (in spite of not being able to use Beryl), the customizability, the ease of configuration and administering and all those other common tasks; many of which are not very fun on Windows. Not to mention the ease of adding software! The repositories are huge, and full of amazing software that can all be updated at once. I’m amazed by that one.

Other initial thoughts

For what it’s worth, I haven’t lost my Mac envy. My ideal setup, at this point, is to get myself a MacBook Pro (drool), get rid of Windows on my desktop, and use Ubuntu as the desktop system/home server. To use Ubuntu for certain development tasks, file storage, learning things, times when I need a desktop, etc. and use the Mac for design work, iTunes, other development stuff, and portability.

Until then, though, Ubuntu is easily the best system in my house.

I have Mac envy. Badly. A month or so ago, I had a hard drive crash that lost lots of important data. I’ve since gotten all the missing data back, but during the last month if Windows being unwilling to read the crashed drive, the time spent trying to get my PC to recognize a new drive, and then the time during which Windows wouldn’t let me slave the old drive to the new drive, I’ve had many thoughts. My most tempting thought has been, “Dude, I should just start over! I should get a Mac! It’s a perfect time, since I don’t have any data or programs.” At this point, I didn’t think it would be possible to affordably retrieve my data. By data, I mean, among other things:

• every website I’ve done, since the Geocities days (I admit, I did get rid of most of those years ago)
• the papers, notes, essays, thoughts, projects, source files, source code, planning documentation, and any number of other things from two college degrees (enough said)
• financial data (also enough said)
• approximately 5 gigs of music, some having been ripped from CDs that I own, but are so skipped that they will not play
• and other things

The reality check is that I can’t afford a new computer of any kind at the moment, but it was so tempting to think about. Today, I was reading one of the .NET blogs I’ve recently come across, and found that this guy’s a Mac user.

So overall, I’m really happy living in a Mac world. I have beautiful hardware running uncluttered UI, and I can still do the Windows stuff when I need to. I’m a happy camper.

So obviously, he’s a happy Mac user. I like reading this. There are parts of the .NET world that I really enjoy, and indeed some things about Microsoft that I really enjoy. I’m at the point in my career where, in the near future, I will be required to make some choices about where, as a web professional, I will go. I’ve considered PHP, as I know it fairly well and enjoy it; I’ve considered Ruby/ROR, and I do intend to learn this in the near future; I’ve considered Flash/Flex, JAVA, ColdFusion, Photoshop, and just being a web standards/XHTML/CSS guy. And, I’ve considered .NET. Microsoft is one of those companies that I don’t always know how I feel about.

But in any case, I really want whatever choice I make to be compatible with my Mac envy. I’ve decided that my next computer purchase will be an Apple. If Visual Studio runs part or most of my livelihood, I can run Windows on that Mac and have my Visual Studio, and that makes me happy. If I don’t go the .NET route, there doesn’t appear to be anything that I can’t do on the Apple OS, and that also makes me happy.

So, thanks Jeff, for increasing my Mac envy. But also, thanks for the sight of a .NET person who uses and enjoys using a Mac.