LincolnBlogs

Ahh, there heresy! Yup, I finally got off my butt and bought a new laptop and IT’S A MAC! A Macbook 5,2, dual core 2ghz, initially with 2gb of ram.

How can this be, you may ask. I thought you are a Linux guy! Well, rest assured, I still am.

Although I am no Apple fanboy, you know the kind that wears turtlenecks with their suit, I do admire the hardware and have for sometime. They make a nice looking machine. Their machines also retain their value more than any other manufacturer, which is a big bonus.

The other thing that helped me make this decision is I am trying hard to leverage myself into doing some Apple server support at work as well. You know the drill, the more I can offer my employer, the longer, easier and more lucrative my stay there will be. That’s how I stayed 13 years at my last job. I was the go-to-guy.

My first impressions after having this almost a week? It’s pretty fast. In fact there was some wow factor there the first time I loaded my intranet page. It popped up so fast it was as if it was a local document! I also think OS 10.5mumble is better than 10.2, 3, or 4. It just seems a little slicker – it’s hard to quantify, it just does.

Of course, the first thing I did was to install the apps on OS X that make it livable for me. The short list is Firefox (Safari? Ick, although it’s MUCH better now than under 10.4), Thunderbird (Mail App can’t hold a candle), OpenOffice (best office suit out there), Vlc (hey, guy has gotta be able to watch his vids and quicktime doesn’t cut the mustard), and Cisco VPN (gotta be able to work). After those, things started to get livable on the machine.

My future plans, of course, involve installing a dual boot of Linux on this machine, and this is where I can use your help. I am looking for opinions and up-to-date howtos on different Distributions to try on here. Everyone always jumps right on the Ubuntu bandwagon, but perhaps there might be some other fun ones out there to try as well 🙂 Just shoot me an email and let me know what you are using and how it works!