There's no Place Like ::1

Yesterday was a bad day for me and my Macbook:

I woke up in the morning earing some strange voices in my head saying “you shall install the latest Linux kernel on you macbook”. Went to my job, installed the latest Debian 2.6.24 Linux image, rebooted, and guess what: no wireless network.

Digging the situation, found that 2.6.24 comes with a new non-proprietary “ath5k” driver for the Macbook’s Broadcom. Unfortunately, it still does not work with PCI-e cards. Tried to revert to the “old” madwifi drivers and after the modprobe I get “could not wake up the MAC chip” yeah!

I thought: “let me install the latest bleeding edge git on this piece of carp”. Download the latest Linux git snapshot, used the same config file as the Debian kernel, make, make install, breakfast, reboot and BANG kernel panic at boot time.

Now comes the best part: my GRUB has a bug that makes it crash as soon as I hit a button on my keyboard. This meant I couldn’t select the old kernel to boot the machine!

Next try: boot with a Live CD to fix the grub problems. My beautiful white piece of crap has a nice optical drive that is unable to read anything on this world… Tried CD, DVD-R, DVD+R.. Stupid drive! Oh and every time I booted the Mac I had to hear the “BOOOOOOONG” sound out loud.. (it seems that you can only disable it on Mac OS) Imagine doing this dozens of times on a office environment; I made no friends today.

Finally booted with a Gentoo Live CD. Unfortunately, the latest stable version does not support correct reading of EFI/GPT partitions, so I couldn’t mount the /boot (first) partition (it needed some kind of offset). This meant I could not fix the Grub menu yeah :D

Another hour trying to boot with other live CDs.. I even tried booting through USB but it seems the this modern white piece of art does not know what it is. Suddenly, a Fedora 8 live DVD booted. I didn’t look back and installed it right away!

Almost everything worked out of the box. Just had to install the madwifi drivers separately, and it all went smoothly (except suspend, of course). Eventually I had a good afternoon of work with a stable system…

Bad day.. bad day…

Apple launches Macbook Air, the: “world’s smallest laptop”!

• It’s not the world’s smallest laptop
• It has a proprietary battery you can’t replace
• No ethernet port??? Ethernet over USB??? WTF??!

Oh, and iPod Touch users, rejoice! Jobs screwed you again. Pay biioootch! :D

Just to report some oddities about Apple I stumbled upon today:

• Portuguese Apple store oddities

Although I am very happy to finally see the opening of the Portuguese apple store online, I must say two things:

– WE ARE NOT SPANISH!!! Half of the store, including many product descriptions, are in pure plain Spanish. If it was Microsoft everyone would be talking. SHAME ON YOU APPLE!

– Today I went to the store trying to buy a Mini-DVI to VGA adapter (yes, you have to buy it separately). I was surprised when the product description said “free shipping” (in Portuguese). I didn’t look back, I really need the adapter! So I clicked in the product, it was added to my cart, and when I went to checkout I have a beautiful message “You have to buy another 81€ to have free shipping”. THEY LIED TO ME!! ARRRRRRRGHHHH…...

• Mac OS Leopard

Now that the hype is settling, I decided that I should try Leopard, just to see if it was a good step forward. Unfortunately I work everyday with a Mac fan (you can’t imagine my suffering) that installed Leopard the first day it was out. He is having random problems like every day, it seems that the SO isn’t ready for production yet.

Then I just found this article.

So Vista seems a big disappointment for Microsoft. Is Leopard in the same situation for Apple?

(Linux! Linux! Linux!) :-)

As you probably know, I am working at a Macbook right now. Unfortunately, using a 13.3’’ display kills my (beautiful) eyes!! So I thought on bringing a 22’’ wide TFT to my work place.

On a normal laptop, I would just connect the VGA display directly or via a DVI → VGA adapter (there are tons of them, and cheap!), if the laptop has a standard DVI socket.

But Apple insisted that they should innovate!! They put a Mini-DVI socket on the Macbook! Mini what?? Who the hell uses that? To make things better, Apple does not give you any adapter on your new macbook!!! Basically, I buy a laptop with a useless external display socket.

Now the best part. After I got home, pissed off, I brought a simple and common DVI → VGA adapter, and GUEST WHAT, *THEY DO NOT CONNECT TO EACH OTHER!!!! Since you probably won’t believe me, I decided to take some pictures and post them here.

On the first picture you can see the bloody Apple adapter. On the second picture you can see a very standard DVI > VGA adapter. Notice the little “-” on the left and the four pins around them? Where do they fit on the Apple adapter??

And now, the coolest thing.. I took a picture of the package where the adapter came from. Just see the diagram, compare with the picture above, and just LAUGH! That explains a lot about Apple hardware designers…

Don’t be surprised if you hear about a bomb on an Apple store O:-)

Yesterday I bought a brand new wired Apple Aluminum Keyboard. I was on an Apple store in Lisbon and asked for the international version of this keyboard. To my suprise, they have just one in stock! I took the chance and bought it.

All I have to say is this: do you want to know girls? Buy this keyboard and show it to them. They will simply go crazy. It real looks better than the pictures. If you see one (and touch it) you will never want to go back to any keyboard.

I’m really not an apple fan boy (I hate them!), but I have to agree this product receives my thumbs up!

PS – On a side note, I’m yet to connect this keyboard to a Mac OS. It is working flawlessly on my Debian installation :) I was curious because in the keyboard box they said “Mac OS only”.