Mini distro (Was: Re: old dogs...new tricks?)

[Christopher Murtagh]

On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Seth Dimbert wrote:
>As an OS9 user who is about to purchase a 12" PB, I'd love to know what
>sort of frustrations you're having.

 Here are a few of them I can think of off the top of my head:

 - sleep issues (MacOS has always had crappy energy saving software); the 
machine drains the battery after a couple of hours if I close the lid. 
This wasn't a problem with my iBook (but my iBook ran OS X for a grand 
total of about 2 hours). I think I can resolve this by changing he sleep 
settings, but that means that I loose my network connections when the 
machine goes to sleep.

 - sftp not built with readline libs. Major drag. When I sftp into my 
servers, I can't use the arrow keys or delete key when I make a typo. 
Also, no history to up-arrow back to. 

 - Open office is still not that great under OS X, and X11 isn't fantastic 
yet either. This means I would have to use M$ Office, which I really 
dislike for so many reasons.

 - Changing /etc/hosts file doesn't work as expected.

 - NetInfo Manager (need I say more?).

 - I've had my Powerbook for a month and I've had 3 kernel panics. I don't
think I *ever* managed to crash my iBook running YDL. These were all
caused by being connected to another machine via Airport, and then
plugging into the LAN before dis-connecting the Airport mounted machines.

 - System paths/file names with uppercase letters and spaces.

 - My biggest problem (and this isn't really one Apple can solve I think),
is that I want to be able to have a system running on my laptop that is a
micro version of the system I maintain for the university (Apache,
Postgres, PHP web portal running on Dual Xeons, Apple G4s and YellowDog
briQs). With my iBook, this was easy to do. I simply compiled the
components the same way I did on the servers, config, set up an /etc/hosts
file (so that machine names resolved locally) and - volia a portable
version of the entire web site/system!

 - The last thing is more of a geek pride thing (ok, I'll admit snobery
here). It is a lot easier for me to show up at an IT meeting with
Slolaris/Windoze geeks with a laptop running Linux than OS X. Right or
wrong, OS X doesn't get the respect that Linux does. At least with Linux
"I'm a rebel that knows what I'm doing" - with OS X, I'm a "rebel that
plays with a toy/candydrop OS". It took me a long time to convince these 
folks that Linux was a viable thing... convincing them that OS X is an 
'enterprise qualiy' OS is more difficult. This is not Apple's fault, they 
are ingorant snobs, but I still have to work with them.

 That's all I can think of at the moment. There are some things I do like 
about MacOS X, but they're more recreational type things - not work 
related.

Cheers,

Chris

-- 

Christopher Murtagh
Webmaster / Sysadmin
Web Communications Group
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec
Canada

Tel.: (514) 398-3122
Fax:  (514) 398-2017