The Plan - By the end of 2003, shift usage of home PC from mostly Windows to mostly Linux.
Windows XP forced my hand a little earlier than I had planned. As of late, I have probably been spending about a third of the time booted into Linux instead of XP. However, when I returned from vacation last week, my PC (Dell Dimension 4400) refused to boot into Windows. About halfway into the boot process, a small blue screen would appear for about quarter of a second and then disappear. Then I would get a screen offering me the option to boot into safe mode. Even in safe mode, no dice.
Fortunately, I had a stable operating system (Red Hat 9) installed on a second hard drive I had added about a year ago. I was able to boot into Linux successfully. After several more attempts to boot Windows, I decided that the data was most important and I gave up on getting Windows to boot.
A quick web search turned up an open source project for a Linux kernel driver for NTFS. Even better, the project supplied an RPM for Red Hat 9. Within about two minutes, I had downloaded the correct RPM, installed it, mounted the NTFS partition, and started copying the files to a Linux partition. WooHoo!
Goodbye, Windows. I knew ya entirely too well.
My lust for the Apple Powerbook was sated today when a box showed up at my front door today containing a 1 GHz, 1 GB, SuperDrive, 15.2 inch TiBook. What a beautiful machine, what a beautiful operating system. Even though it's technically Sandra's computer, I plan on spending a significant amount of quality time with it.
I have a Dell desktop dual booting RedHat 8.0 Linux and Windows XP for personal use, an IBM ThinkPad T23 laptop running Windows 2000 Professional for primary work use, and a Dell workstation running Windows 2000 Server (with Red Hat 8.0 running in a virtual machine) for my web server, servlet engine, database server, and full J2EE app server at work. Each of these operating systems and computers absolutely pale in comparison to the PowerBook and OS X.
There are a couple downsides, though. The reception with the AirPort card sucks. There's no other word for it. My ThinkPad also has a titanium case, but it gets noticeably better reception. The distance from the access point in the office to the couch in the living room is about 50 feet, albeit through two thick lath and plaster walls with some bathroom tile. While the ThinkPad's card gets only a weak signal, it rarely drops out entirely. The AirPort card's signal drops out frequently at the same location. Now, I have to mess around with the antennas on the access point to see if I can improve the situation.
Also, I like the keyboard on the ThinkPad better, and I even like the eraser head mouse stick better than the Mac's trackpad, but that may just take some getting use to. I hated the mouse stick the first time I used it, but now it seems natural. Other than that, though, as a power user and a software developer, I think the Mac is a far better value for the money than an Intel-based laptop running Windows, or even Linux.
Safari is a pretty sweet web browser, too, but I miss tabbed browsing. Please, Apple, add tabs in the next release!
