The Goldfish Chronicles

Tiger, aka OS X 10.4, is now available. It’s the biggest improvement to the Apple since the year dot according to Steve Jobs and as with every release I can’t see a single thing that I believe I’ll be using in 6 months time. There is one unspoken feature that I will be using though, and every day, and that’s Tiger, aka Java 5.0. I’ll be spending 100+ dollars on a new version of OS X to get the wonderful benefit of being able to program in Java 5.0, a year or so after the rest of the mainstream operating systems (aka Win + Lin).

Well, I love my powerbook. It’s only a G4 400mhz, but it’s a sweet piece of hardware. True, it’s a bit of a dog when I run Maven or when I use Ant to generate the Jakarta site, and the battery (second one in its lifetime) has gone senile, but it’s light, sturdy and has an internal wireless card.

However, a much cheaper, younger Dell Inspiron 4150, bought to play Windows games on the living room floor has been winking suggestively and making suggestive motions towards the SuSE 9.2 DVD. Finally I could take the temptation no more and succumbed to the heady joys of an install.

Last night was spent clearing space on the XP installation and using Partition Magic 8.0 to provide 15Gig or so for Linux. Tonight was spent doing a (hopefully) painless installation of SuSE 9.2. In the end, it was pretty painless. The only pain I hit was in terms of the Netgear WG511 wireless card I wanted to use, and after some googling and grumbling I found that I just needed to download a firmware file and put it in a directory. So very, very impressive. (oh, no mouse-scroll-wheel in KDE, but does work in Firefox).

JDK 1.5 was the first thing installed. SVN/CVS were there already from SuSE. Download Ant, Maven. Check out the Jakarta site and revel in the 10 second site generation (took 2 minutes + on the powerbook). Grab the osjava.org SVN repository and ‘maven jar’ osjava-payload in a wonderful 7 seconds (after the usual first time through setup).

After that, the night was spent playing with KDE, setting revolving backgrounds, installing Firefox, NVu and generally having fun. I won’t claim to have unswitched fully yet, but it’s awfully close. SuSE 8.2 on the same hardware was a bit hit and miss. SuSE 9.2 (and any other similarly aged distro I assume) seems a winner. Power-management (sleeping and length of battery life) is probably the biggest issue left to confront.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005 at 11:23 pm and is filed under Family etc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.