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Monday, June 23. 2008

[lazyweb] laptop woes

Dear Lazyweb,

For a long time I have been using a combination of Linux and Mac OS X, I have Linux on my desktop machine at work and Mac OS X on my laptop (a macbook, previously a powerbook). I've tried in various times and various ways to run Linux on my mac laptops as well, with varying amounts of fail.

These two usages are generally quite happily split. Anything involving writing code has been done in Linux, and if I needed to do anything from my laptop I have a small far less ideal setup, or just ssh to my work machine and work there. My macs have happily supported: syncing with my phone (calendars and contacts), and itunes, and skype.

Now that I'm in London and back to full time work, I don't have the support of my Linux machine 17 minutes walk away from home, and I'm exclusively using my laptop, and it's driving me crazy. For the first time ever I'm starting to feel hatred for my mac. So I'm thinking about buying another laptop, probably a Samsung Q45 or Q70. I'm leaning towards the Q45.

Anyway, back to switching over.

I am not too worried about my ability to get skype going, that should be fairly trivial. The Q45s I have seen have an integrated webcam similar to the macbooks, although I can't see that at the specification on the above link, not sure about the Q70. Video calling is not compulsory, although I do use it to talk to people I left behind in Wellington.

I'm not too worried about itunes either, I currently have a very old ipod and an ipod shuffle, but I do have all the music that was on there backed up on a usb drive. If anyone has any recommendations for good ways to deal with ipods under Linux, that would be helpful.

The thing that I am worried about is syncing with my phone. In Linux I don't currently use calendars (I've been using the Mac OS Calendar for a long time happily), and I use abook for addresses, which I loathe but rarely have to touch. I have a Nokia e65.

So I need: a good way to manage music with ipod-ish things (I'm guessing the answer to this is going to be amarok), a good calendar, some way to sync contacts and calendars to my phone.

Help me lazweb-kenobi, you're my only hope.


Edit: and any recommendations on where to buy in London (or online), preferably with the option to get a US keyboard
Posted by Penny at 09:08 | Comments (14) | Trackbacks (0)
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Hello Penny,

Well, of course the answer will be Amarok! I use it with a (recent) iPod and it works quite well.

For calendars, though, I don't know anything that really works as well as iCal. KOrganiser isn't bad, but.. not great either ... yet. :) The one from Mozilla has a lot of nice features, but it crashed repeatedly when I (and others) tried to use it.

...Good luck!

Mat
#1 Mathieu (Homepage) on 2008-06-23 10:31 (Reply)
My suggestion:

Keep the mac.

Buy VMWare Fusion.

Install virtualised Linux of choice.

Problem solved?

(I hope)

((PS: MOAR UPDATES!))
#2 Malach (Homepage) on 2008-06-23 21:56 (Reply)
Ack, this post had made my fickle and impressionable mind decide on buying a cheap non-Mac laptop. Bbut then Malach comes along with a solution that will cost me more money but leave me with so much more prettiness...
#2.1 SonniesEdge (Homepage) on 2008-06-23 22:12 (Reply)
Meh. I partitioned it with bootcamp (only able to create a windows partition) and then installed debian on it (having to drop and recreate the bootcamp partition), got it mostly going (with the exception of being too terrified to even try to get it to suspend and hitting mouse emulation bugs), but then couldn't run it in parallels, presumably because the new linux partition didn't have the bootcamp signature. MEH MEH MEH. Not to mention the annoyance of regularly using two systems on the same machine.
#3 Penny Leach (Homepage) on 2008-06-23 22:18 (Reply)
Yick, dual-boot sucks. Did that on my last Samsung laptop (until the day it was taken to live with the angels). Would never do it again.

If you're getting rid of the MacBook you've got a UK buyer here. Going crazy with no portable 'puter!
#3.1 SonniesEdge (Homepage) on 2008-06-23 22:37 (Reply)
Thanks but I found someone already. Not hard at all to find someone to buy macbooks :)
#3.1.1 Penny Leach (Homepage) on 2008-06-23 22:40 (Reply)
Poo.

Guess I should be patient for the Back to School deals... ::looks at calendar, taps fingers, fidgets::
#3.1.1 SonniesEdge (Homepage) on 2008-06-23 22:47 (Reply)
Erm.. why partition? Seems to me to be the most possible complex way of doing things.

The benefit of virtualisation is that you don't have to faff around with dual boot crap.

Also, if all you want is a server that you can SSH into, why would you bother with any sort of GUI on the linux (virtual) box? Treat it like a server - no GUI, just SSH.

Of course, if you're just looking for an excuse to buy new hardware/toy, don't let me stop you :)
#4 Malach (Homepage) on 2008-06-23 23:14 (Reply)
Umm.. but the whole point is that I want the GUI. I did actually want something that I could run both in dual boot and in a vm, unfortunately it just didn't work out :(

If it was just SSH, I would just use some server somewhere.
#5 Penny Leach (Homepage) on 2008-06-23 23:34 (Reply)
Really? People actually want a Linux gui for something?

I thought it was more something that users tolerated in order to get to the system underneath.

(only a very small amount of sarcasm intended there - I'm honestly somewhat surprised)
#5.1 Malach (Homepage) on 2008-06-23 23:42 (Reply)
hehe, yes, definitely. definitely
#5.1.1 Penny Leach (Homepage) on 2008-06-23 23:47 (Reply)
Err. Dualboot with Macbook+Debian seems hard.

Same issue like you. I need to use Mac OS at work and missing my Debian love at moment :(

(Well, I can do ssh, but need `real` machine to test my packages!)
#6 Kartik Mistry (Homepage) on 2008-06-29 15:39 (Reply)
I use virtualbox on my Mac laptop - works like a charm, and is cheaper than VMware (supports useful things like snapshots, full screen and seamless mode)
#7 Glynn Foster (Homepage) on 2008-06-30 03:47 (Reply)
thanx for sharing your own imressions on work with Linux and Mac OS X... it's really very interesting
#8 Emma - Software Recovery Reviewer (Homepage) on 2008-11-24 11:38 (Reply)

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