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You know, I kinda feel bad about the last post I wrote regarding my laptop. With all the discussions of problems I’m having, casual readers might reckon that I’m having a negative experience with OSX on my PC. Quite the contrary, I can assure you. As a matter of fact, this experience – if anything – has solidified my firmly held belief that OSX is the best damn operating system, period. All the problems I’m having aside, I’m very impressed by OSX; It’s obvious to me that Microsoft or our friends The Open Source Community got nuthin’ on Leopard.

I don’t want to discuss technical merit. Obviously, Windows has it’s uses where OSX simply wouldn’t fit. I.E. anywhere you already have a non-apple computer and want to put an OS on it. Anyone who wants to win that discussion can simply point at my laptop and laugh. I want to discuss design philosophy, I want to discuss User Experience, and most importantly – I want to discuss work flow. Not the scripting app, the concept involving starting from point A, and ariving at point B. Getting things done, if you will.

I love the Macintosh Desktop. Leopard still has a few mountains to climb before I call it Computing Utopia, but it’s lapped Vista six or seven times already. The proof is in the pudding, I reckon. Just look at Vista.

(Another long post, after the jump)

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Have you ever wanted to run Windows on a iMac G5? Sure, you’d never replace Leopard… you love leopard. If it weren’t for Leopard, you’d be slumming it on Windows XP. Having said that, Maybe you need to be able to hop on to IE every once in a while to see if something works, and it’s not exactly possible when your one architecture over from anything Windows is compatible with. If I were using a Mac from the past few years, I’d throw Parallels on it, laugh rather loudly as I enjoyed it’s soft gooey middle.

Now, I have a need that requires that I be able to run one Windows Application, Internet Explorer. I can not run this application on my Mac because of the aforementioned problem with running proprietary x86 code from Microsoft on a RISC processor. So, I’ve decided to forego Virtual Machine Environments for Virtual Network Computing.

Take a look at how elegant this is.

On the Mac side of the equation, it’s just about perfect. Leopard has a VNC Client built right in, you can get to it from the Go menu in Finder, ‘Connect to server’ and type in vnc://ip_address. It really couldn’t be more perfect. Well, I guess there’s the whole Host Cursor always being toggled on, even though I always turn it off… but, the host cursor does come in handy when you scale the VNC window down. You see, you can scale it down so it will fit unobtrusively in some corner while you work on your mac, and it’s still useable… The Host Cursor still shows, so you can control it. Works well with Windows Updates.

However, I figured since I had the ‘Server’ (as I’m calling it) there running IE for me, I might as well outsource some of my overhead to it, so my Mac will run better. Those of you who have noted my Dock will notice that I’ve removed Transmission, my trusty Bittorrent client, off the showcase. Instead, I installed uTorrent (probably the best BT Client, ever), installed and enabled the WebUI plugin, scarred up a decent little Torrent Folder hierarchy, shared it, and then wrote an Automator Script to transfer any Torrent Files from my Downloads Folder to the ‘Drop Box’ folder in my Torrent’s Folder on the server. uTorrent can automatically add any new torrent files in a given directly to it’s download list. When the Torrent’s finish, the files are copied to a specific folder, and it basically offloads a good chunk of data slowness to a computer that was just sitting there taking up wattage.

For anyone who’s never worked with Automator before, you can save your Workflows as plug-ins, like as a Folder Action. Then, The workflow is ran every time something happens in the folder. I like Apple’s broad range of automating options. It makes life a lot easier.

I couldn’t go this far without gutting my MAMP setup and making it in to a WAMP setup instead. I’m finally able to complete downloads again, and my system runs a lot faster.

It’s crazy… I’ve recently added the out-and-out peachy Alarm Clock 2 App, which brings my Mac out of Sleep Mode and starts playing ‘Make it Mine’ by Jason Mraz 9AM every morning. Used to, My computer was always on, always doing something or another. I was used to sleeping with the hum, I was used to the glow it made, but lately I’ve gotten in to the habit of Sleeping my Mac when I’m not using it. My REM cycles thank me. It works great – everything that requires constant back-end processor cycles has been offloaded to a computer somewhere else in the house.

My Mac is literally just a music player, web browser, text editor and does a little photo editing. My Mac handles BT files by handing it off to a Windows machine, and the Windows Machine keeps me apprised of it’s progress through a web interface. Plus, if I need to use a Windows machine for anything, I can use it with VNC. When I get XP spitting and stuttering, I can just close the window and do something else with no performance boost once so ever.

Sure, if I had a faster Mac none of this would really be necessary, but since I don’t, I might as well embrace making it run better with bitch XP desktops.

Welcome back, old chum. No matter how hard I try, I can’t get rid of you.

By this time tomorrow, if all goes according to plan, I will no longer own a PC.

Yes, friends, I am giving up my 22" Wide Screen of Justice, my .75 Terabytes of movies, music and apps, and my stunningly quick desktop environment, for a two year old G5 iMac with Leopard.

Some think I’m crazy… I think it’s just time for a change. Fuck Windows Vista, Fuck Debian, and a special fuck you to Windows XP. I’m jumping ship.

Some of these are problems with fstab, some of these are problems with the kernel’s handling of USB Mass Storage Devices, however Gnome was less than helpful in solving any of those problems in a reasonable way. Other problems, such as my missing Nelly (The M’yrr, not ‘Loose’) Collection, I blame solely on Nautilus’ file handling and inability to provide any inkling of control over the mess it was making. I know this, because as I try to clean up after myself, I seemed to spend more time in the terminal than playing with my player.

I own one of these things. A MEElectronics 4GB RockMee MP4 Player. It was built by some six year old indentured to some fat Chinese guy who runs that kid’s home, which is the sweat shop he builds MP4 players and Keyboards in.

It’s software allows it to play AVI files encoded by some obscure codec I haven’t bothered to look up, because I don’t want to watch videos that bad. It plays MP3 files, has Tag Stacks so you can view your music by genre, playlist, artist, album… and a folder view. Pretty much has the features you’d want, and nothing ever has.

It also has a text viewer. I found a few books online that I wanted to read, pasted the contents in a text file, and the viewer does, in-fact, display them. I discovered this morning that I was right – I can read a book on a 2.5" screen, and be perfectly content with it. I must have read two chapters on it in one sitting, it’s white text on a black sreen – small text, but perfectly readable. It’ll open the text viewer where it left off (so you don’t need to remember your page number – which it displays), and the skip buttons Page Up and Down. Not perfect, if I had the source code, I’d be making changes instead of writing this review, but it is what it is – and I’ve never had one of these before…. I think for $100, I’d buy it again if I lost this one. I can see a future in copying Windows Serials to this thing… you know, just incase.

Now – for all the shit I throw at WMP 11, it’s actually developed in to the only decent Media Player for Vista. iTunes (best music player on XP, certainly so on OSX) is horrible on Vista. Amarok won’t run on Windows yet, and since I refuse to use Winamp to manage a real music library, I’m forced to use WMP11. After Amarok and I went through and whipped my collection in to shape, WMP doesn’t do such a horrible job.

As a matter of fact, I’ve grown somewhat fond of it. Searching for "dr. dre + eminem + dogg + 2pac + tupac + warren g + snoop + nate" and then listening to what I’ve dubbed ‘Deathrow/Aftermath’ makes you feel like your collection has some substance to it. Amarok doesn’t do that, and in Windows – you can do that search in Explorer and come up with the same playlist items. It works… and that’s a plus.

My MP4 player is syncing that Deathrow/Aftermath playlist right now. WMP is re-encoding all the music to a lower bit-rate so I can fit more in to it, and if I use WMP to make changes, I can feel relativity certain that I’m not transcoding my entire library every time I add a file. The device was plug and play, I didn’t even have to restart WMP after I plugged the device in, add the command line to mount and eject the device, dig around in my /dev folder, or enter a terminal. In Windows, the little fucker just works… in Linux? Well…

I won’t say it doesn’t work in Linux; I filled my player up with shit from Amarok soon after I got it. There was a stumbling block – basically…

# device name   mount point     fs-type     options                            dump-freq pass-num
LABEL=/         /               ext3        defaults                                   1 1
/dev/hda6       swap            swap        defaults                                   0 0
none            /dev/pts        devpts      gid=5,mode=620                             0 0
none            /proc           proc        defaults                                   0 0
none            /dev/shm        tmpfs       defaults                                   0 0

# Removable media
/dev/cdrom      /mount/cdrom    udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro                      0 0
/dev/fd0        /mount/floppy   auto        noauto,owner,kudzu                         0 0

# NTFS Windows XP partition
/dev/hda1       /mnt/WinXP      ntfs-3g     quiet,defaults,locale=en_US.utf8,umask=0   0 0

# Partition shared by Windows and Linux
/dev/hda7       /mnt/shared     vfat        umask=000                                  0 0

This is your basic /etc/fstab file. Nothing up my sleeve, it’s all fairly understandable if you’ve ever messed with SMB, mounting a volume, or understand the first thing about linux. What it does, is it tells your computer how to deal with the volumes it needs to mount. For an NTFS partition, this file says the volume is located at /dev/hda1, it’s mount point (where you can use it) at /mnt/winxp, it will need the NTFS-3g daemon to understand the file system, and the various options for the drive to work properly.

My MP4 Player has a MiniSD card slot that will also try to mount as a physical drive. Linux will try and mount that, fail, and then think it’s done.

It’s not done – it just didn’t bother to give the device a second to offer the internal storage, the secondary drive to my device. So, in order to make it work – you have to mount it manually. Works fine in Windows, but in Linux the 4GB embedded storage isn’t usable unless you mount it.

you can do it with the following command…

sudo mount /dev/sdc /media/mp4 -t vfat

Well, the first time you can. Regardless to rather or not you eject the media…

sudo eject /dev/sdc

or

sudo eject /media/mp4

You still can’t eject the media card drive, because although it’s viewable, there is no volume to eject. on my system, the media card reader is sdb, my MP4 player is sdc. Until you eject sdc and unplug it. sdb doesn’t go away, it stays there.

plug it back in, the media card is now sbc, the 4GB storage drive is sdd. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t prevent sd plus a letter from happening. This means there isn’t a script you can write to handle this thing properly, as the kernel is throwing it all out of wack. There’s probably a better way of handling this problem, but I don’t know what it is.

Once you get it mounted, you have read-only permissions to the volume. I’ve tried to finagle it so I wouldn’t have to be root to access it, but being that it was a moot point because I couldn’t get the thing to mount correctly anyway’s, I had to open Nautilus as root to make any changes to the drive.

Now, I don’t know how much you understand about ejecting devices… but in Windows, it’s never been a big deal… the File system is updated every time a file operation is completed, and ejecting it might be safer for some other reason, but Windows does a very good job at keeping the drive tidy.

Gnome, however, doesn’t. As Nautilus is my file viewer, and Gnome is my shell, I think it falls in their lap. If you don’t eject your media, files you deleted aren’t actually removed, files you added aren’t actually usable. Now, the data is removed and added – but the updates to the file system aren’t done until you eject, so if you copied 2GB of data, didn’t eject it, you won’t be able to read it on the player. Since gPartd saw the internal storage of my FAT32 volume as un-partioned space (even though Windows sees it as FAT32), I had to format the drive (from the player, Linux wouldn’t do it) and copy the files again. Just real fuckin’ annoying.

Gnome sucks at file management. I inadvertently moved 500MB of Nelly from my music library to my MP4 player, some shit Windows would have warned me about. Luckily for me, I was smart enough to backup the entire directory structure of the player before booting in to windows and letting WMP do something useful… so I probably haven’t lost anything. The fact remains, though…

Linux: 500 problems, and several hours wasted.

Windows: 86% Synchronized, took me like six seconds to select the playlists I wanted and tell WMP how I wanted them compressed to maximize my storage potential. Takes a while to transfer the music, but meh – only got to do it once. There was one problem, my ‘The M’yrr’ playlist wouldn’t copy – as it turns out, the files were missing…

Don’t get me wrong – it’s pretty damned impressive for free, but it’s not better than Windows. Windows handled it without a cinch…