…To MacBook

I saw that Snow Leopard was only going to be $29 and I was so ready to jump on that bandwagon until the day they released it. Rumors went around that Parallels 3.0 does not work on Snow Leopard. This doesn’t work for me because I have a windows XP drive set up with parallels 3.0 which I use when some clients require me to use Windows or to test web pages on IE. Some people recommended I use a different VM but I spent a long time just setting up the windows on parallels that I don’t want to do that all over again.

Just when I quit on the idea of upgrading to snow leaopard, I found this site that has a large list of application compatibility with Snow Leopard:

http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/o-t

That’s where I found out that Parallels 4.0 works with Snow Leopard, so I decided to upgrade. I just spent $56.98 to upgrade to 4.0.

Installation is pretty straight forward. I downloaded a .dmg file from Parallels, double click on the file and you get a window that has the installation package. Just double click the installation package and follow the instructions. I just went with all the defaults without changing anything.

Before starting parallels 4.0 up, remember to first back up your windows installation just in case something goes horribly wrong. I’m using time machine and will be forcing it to do a backup right before I start it up. If you don’t have time machine set up then you could just as easily go to where you installed your windows VM and you should find two files. The first is a .pvs file, should be a small file that just has the VM configuration (mine is called “Microsoft Windows XP PRO.pvs”). The second file is the actual virtual hard drive (yeah I said actual virtual!) with a .hdd extension (mine is called winxp.hdd). You can also save the .fdd file (the floppy drive) but I don’t think that’s necessary but why not just back that up as well.

After installation, I ran the windows vm configuration by double clicking on it. I got a prompt that asked me to upgrade the VM to the new version with a warning to back up before doing so. Because we’ve already backed everything up, I just went ahead with the upgrade process. After a few minutes, parallels 4 started normally. The only problem I’ve been having is an issue with the floppy drive not being recognized which I don’t really care about because I don’t use it, everything else is working.

Using the macbook for the first time you immediately realize the CTRL key doesn’t control much. I use keyboard shortcuts most of the time, it saves me a lot of time that would be wasted moving my right hand to and from the mouse. The most common of those shortcuts are: ctrl-C, ctrl-V, ctrl-D, ctrl-Z, ctrl-Y. Taking out the mac for a test drive your instinct tells you to use CTRL-C to copy something but nothing happens. Next step was to figure out what the shortcuts are. I used the mouse to go to the menu and check out the shortcuts next to each item. I noticed that everything uses that key with the apple logo and a weird symbol on it.

It’s called the command key and all the windows and linux shortcuts are pretty much the same except you use command instead of CTRL. so copying would be command + C and so on.

I also went digging a little more online to find other shortcuts. In windows you can press Alt+F4 to close windows and when all windows are closed it brings up the “shut down computer” dialog. Command-F4 didn’t do anything. The following page helped me a lot in learning shortcuts:

Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts [Apple]

to bring up the shutdown dialog box you need to hold down Control + Eject for a second or two. What I cannot figure out yet is how to move between the different choices in a dialog box.

I think a good first post would be to explain why I chose to get a mac or a macbook at that. My only interaction with a mac before I bought the macbook was a very long time ago and it was not pretty.

A friend of mine had a mac (pre OS X) and was away from his computer and asked me to check something on it. By that time I was already very familiar with windows, had a base working knowledge of linux and a lot of experience with hardware. What my friend asked for was a simple task that should have been easy for even a not so computer savvy person. To my surprise, and eventual frustration, I couldn’t figure anything out and crashed his computer. I had sworn not to touch another mac.

What made me change my mind was a combination of things. First off, I had since then worked with linux a lot more and had much more experience. I have had linux as my desktop machine at work for the past 3 years (windows at home only because of gaming). All my work is linux based and so even on a windows machine all I did was use putty to connect to a linux machine and work. Windows had just become a shell instead of the operating system I do my work in. Apple switched their OS to use Unix since OS X which made it easier for me to understand and get to the root of errors when they arise. This eased my fears of not knowing how to even do the simplest tasks.

The second point was that I needed a laptop to work on. I didn’t want to just have another shell computer where I used it to then connect to a remote server where I did my actual work. With a laptop, I might be somewhere that I have no connection to the internet and want to continue working. My initial though was to buy a laptop and just install linux on but I haven’t had much luck with that in the past. I have a Dell Inspiron 9100 and installing linux to properly work on there (with full audio, video and wireless support) was a major headache. I was still ready to put up with that headache though if it meant I would now be able to work directly on local machine instead of connecting remotely.

While I was researching which laptop would be best suited for linux, a friend/coworker, Geoff (and an avid mac user), pointed out that macs were now based on unix. He brought his powerbook to work every day and with it I was able to get some first hand experience using the new operating system. I was now more at ease with mac OS X. Finally he made the argument that with the latest macbooks running on unix and being Intel based I could easily compile and use most of the open source tools I use on linux (apache, perl, mysql and so on), I also wouldn’t have hardware incompatibility issues and running out trying to find drivers like I would when installing linux on another laptop and finally with all the UI tools on the mac, other than work I could use my laptop for things like watching a movie or listening to music without much hassle.

I was sold. Now I needed to find the model that best suits my needs. I didn’t want to have a big laptop. I had the inspiron 9100 before and that thing is HUGE. You can’t carry it without sustaining a shoulder injury. I wanted a smaller, more portable laptop. macbook pros only come in 15 and 17 inch displays so I opted to go with the macbook.

One last thing I had to wait for was that back then macbooks still used core duo processors while macbook pros had already moved to core 2 duo. I wasn’t in a hurry and waited for core 2 duo to be released on macbooks.
I’ve been using the macbook for a few months now and I can say that I am not disappointed by the move.

More on initial OS shock soon…

I registered this URL when I had just ordered my macbook hoping to have a day to day analysis of my initial OS shock. I had a lot of things that took precedence over this project though and so I have been putting it off. I did keep notes of the issues I was having and how I resolved them so I’ll be posting those along the way.

I won’t be talking only about going from a linux environment to a mac. I’ve been a windows user for a long time and I will try and discuss using a mac from both OS viewpoints. Of course it was a lot easier for me knowing linux, since OS X is based on Unix.