Macbook Trials and Tribulations

Well it's the end of week one with the new Macbook. So far I've successfully installed Windows and partially installed Linux. So it is now tri-boot, with the cavaet that Linux doesn't yet boot fully, which I'm still working on. Other than that the new computer works great. There's only one problem, and it's a bug in Mac OS X that's truly annoying. It seems that there's issues with the WPA drivers for the wireless card. Now from what I've seen on Apple's it's a widespread problem that has people up in arms. For example, for my network, the bug prevented me and Mrs. Evil from connecting to Google. Everything else worked fine, unless they linked to Google of course. So if you need WPA, you may want to wait till Apple gets this bug fixed. I've gotten around the problem by using the less secure WEP protocol which does work. Other than that, I've no complaints about the computer.

The thing I do like about Mac OS-X is that it's based on BSD, which means that you can head to the command line to get around things the GUI won't let you do. It also lets me secure shell into my Linux desktop to check my email and run the things that I have on that machine. I'll have to see how the programing tools are, which I might add came with the computer as opposed to say, Windows, where you have to either buy at great expense Microsoft's or third party tools or use cygwin to run the gnu tools. This is an area to explore still.

The hardware is good so far. The display is crisp and the battery life is exceptional. Apart from the bug in the WPA driver, the wireless networking works good. The keyboard took some getting used to, the key spacing being a little different from my old notebook, but despite it's chiclet appearance the feel of the keys is like a regular keyboard. The touch pad is, well a touch pad. I've never been fond of touch pads and I have a USB mouse that works with the computer for when I'm doing any major amount of work. The fact that it's possible to run all three major OS's on the hardware speaks volumes for the system.

So I'm generally please with the purchase, though I am a little annoyed with the WPA bug which hopefully will be corrected soon. I also need to get Linux working, but it's spring break and I'll look at doing that this week sometime. Ahh technology.