Re: advice for a mac laptop, please

In article
<1153481501.610916.14400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"sampay" <matteo.nasi@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

hi Bob

thanks for your answer, i am familiar with Linux, I Know how to use
Fedora Core 4 quite well.

do you think learning the new Mac with the Unix envirnmental could be
complicated and how long I can take to learn it ?

cheers

From the command line, it will behave mostly the same and you will
have to learn almost nothing.

From the Gnome or KDE GUI then there is more of a difference. But
it is a point and click difference, which is much easier to learn.

System admin tasks are done via the GUI. This is not hard, as
generally speaking the Mac just works out of the box. Also there
are lots of books that can and will help explain this stuff if you
want to get into the deeper aspects of Mac OS X.

Bob Harris

Bob Harris wrote:
In article
<1153386069.552192.292870@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"sampay" <matteo.nasi@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

hi Bob

thanks for the answer.

I explain to you my need, so maybe you can give some more advice

I am a Phd student in computational chemistry at Durham University, so
i need Linux ( corrently i am using Fedora Core 4 ) for my Phd.

So in one months time I want to buy a laptop, but i don't know what
kind .

A lot of people told me that the new MAc is very good, stable and
reliable, but i never use MAC, is difficult to learn how to use MAC?

Obviously we don't think so, we're Mac users :-)

But as has been pointed out by some of the posts, your fingers and
mouse may want to go to the familiar Windows places, and you will
have to retrain them to go to the Mac places.

There are books on switching which can help identify how to do the
Mac way of doing what you did on a Windows PC.

There have been lots of articles on switching. This is one that
showed up in Digg.com today
<http://www.applematters.com/index.php/section/comments/switch-to-a
-mac-and-youll-never-go-back/>

As others have suggested, you might even be able to compile and
run your Linux application(s) on Mac OS X.

so I need a laptop in which I can have one distribution of Linux (
Fedora, Ubuntu) and Windows ( unfortunately some application and
streaming fiction program only you can see with Windwos Media Player ),
this is the reason I need Windwos, not because i like it, most of the
time is crashig , but !!!!!!!!!!!

Depending on what the Windows Media Player needs are, it may be
possible to use Flip4Mac <http://www.flip4mac.com/> to play them.
And if Flip4Mac doesn't do the job, Parallels Workstation running
Windows will. And of course Apples Boot Camp will run Windows XP
if you want to work in a dual boot mode
<http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/>

Which criteria do you think need in order to buy a laptop that allow me
to have what I need?

If you decide to get a Mac, then buy the system you think will do
what you need to do:
MacBook <http://www.apple.com/macbook/macbook.html>
or
MacBook Pro <http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/>

Get minimum amount of memory, and then go to a 3rd party to get
additional memory. If you decide to run Parallels, and it looks
like that would be a very good way for you to go, then increase
the memory to 2GB. Use someone like newegg.com, curcial.com,
ramseeker.com, dealram.com, etc... to find much less expensive
memory.

If you want to run a lot of different versions of different
operating systems, you may need a generous amount of disk space,
as most OS distributions these days tend to consume a fair amount
of disk space when installed, and you are going to sharing the
same disk with all of them. So you might want to think about how
much disk space you think you are going to need before you buy.
NOTE: The MacBook (not the Pro) does make it easy to upgrade the
internal SATA disk, so if you decide you need a larger disk later,
it is not too painful to upgrade.

Also all the Macs have Firewire and USB ports where you can attach
external disk drives to, for situations where you will be parking
your system while running additional guest operating systems under
Parallels.

I wish you luck.

Bob Harris

cheers

Matteo

Bob Harris wrote:
In article
<1153296443.767650.221640@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"sampay" <matteo.nasi@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

hi all

I would like to buy a Mac laptop, and I need to have Linux and
Window.
I know that the new Mac has Unix system (what is the name?) so maybe
is not difficult to put linux.
Can someone tell me where I can find more information about mac and
compatibility with Linux and Macrosoft.

Also can you advice some website about Mac, and the differentes
between
Linux.

thanks in advance for the answer.

regards

Current MacBooks and MacBooks Pros are intel Core Duo based system
without the traditional BIOS.

Not having a traditional BIOS means Windows will not boot out of
the box; but with Boot Camp, free download from Apple, you can
boot Windows XP).

I think I recall that there are some Linux distro that can boot on
a MacBook/MacBook Pro, but I could be remembering wrong. Suggest
some Google searches for "MacBook Linux" and that should lead you
to info on Linux and MacBooks. And if Linux does not boot native
today, I'm sure it will in short order, such being the nature of
Linux.

BUT WAIT, there's more! Parallels is a Virtual Machine
environment that runs on Mac OS X, and allows you to run just
about any PC based operating system concurrently with Mac OS X.
So get Parallels and run any version of Windows, and any version
Linux, and run multiple instances if you like. Highly recommended
that you max out on memory if you intend to run Parallels as your
performance can be affected if you over commit on memory trying to
run multiple concurrent operating systems.

Mac OS X is based on CMU's Mach 3.0 _AND_ FreeBSD. Mach provides
the micro-kernel, and FreeBSD provides the UNIX API and most of
the utilities. http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/unix/

Many Open Source software packages build without problems on Mac
OS X, and there are 2 projects that offer pre-build Open Source
packages for Mac OS X (http://fink.sf.net and
http://darwinports.com/).

Mac OS X includes an X11 environment as an optional install on the
distribution DVD (you have to look for it, but it is there).

While Mac OS X does get a lot of its UNIXie flavor from FreeBSD,
it has its own Mac OS X driver subsystem, so you can not use
FreeBSD drivers, nor Linux drivers. So if there is some special
one-of-a-kind driver you need to use, then you may be out of luck.

Then again, Mac OS X has drivers for most common things
(networking, WiFi, disks, printers, keyboards, mice, USB,
Firewire, etc..), and many 3rd party vendors provide drivers for
their add-on devices.

Compatibility with Linux, above and beyond what I've already said.
I use Mac OS X at work, and I develop kernel level code for a
Linux system. I am mostly ssh'ed into a Linux box to do my
development, but I use bash as my shell, and I have a single set
of .bashrc and .bash_profile scripts. I use Vim as my editor, and
I have a single set of .vimrc initialization scripts I use on my
Mac and my Linux boxes. Many of the scripts I write to make my
work life easier run on both the Mac and the Linux boxes. If I
write a tool in C it can mostly compile and be run the same on
both Mac and Linux (depends on whether the tool just needs POSIX
APIs or if it needs APIs outside the POSIX API set).

Mac OS X has TCP/IP, ssh, ftp, X11, rsync, Vim, emacs, grep, find,
awk, xargs, perl, python, php, apache, NFS etc... already
installed.

The Xcode developer tools (also an optional install on the
distribution DVD) provides the compiler and other software
development tools, which you will need if you intend to install
your own Open Source code from sources.

Compatibility with Windows. Mac OS X includes Samba for sharing
file systems, and printers with Windows. There are some other
features that allow Macs to play with Windows systems out of the
box. http://www.apple.com/macosx/overview/compatibility.html
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/windows/

O'Reilly has some good books about Mac OS X UNIX side of the
house, and there are some other books such as Mac OS X Unleashed,
and the newly printed Mac OS X Internals that will also tell you
tons of stuff about the UNIX side of Mac OS X. Try doing some
browsing an a bookstore with a moderate computer book section.

Bob Harris
.

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