The ibook install went so smoothly that I decided to upgrade my desktop. It’s sure a lot easier than it used to be between versions of Fedora. No CDs to burn, no rebooting (actually one time at the very end, but still), and a reasonably quick too boot: from about 7pm until morning. (It could have been longer, since it would periodically hang on an interactive prompt, and I wasn’t babysitting the install. But there were only a handful of those.)

I haven’t used my iBook during 2007. It’s an 800 MHz G3. Also, I don’t have a copy of 10.4 “Tiger” for it, and between the speed and the increasing degree to which it is isolated from the software I’d like to use, it just isn’t worth the effort. (This is with the exception of 10 minutes about 10 days ago when I convinced myself that the network was working but my Linux machine’s NIC wasn’t working.)

Anyway, this has changed now that the latest version of Ubuntu is out. Its support for the PowerPC architecture is awesome. (It’s much better than a couple of years ago, when I briefly tried Yellow Dog — which may also be better now; I wouldn’t know. I’m not slamming YD, just puffing Ubuntu.) I was most impressed that it just worked. I haven’t done a complete test of power management and other laptop-y functions, but most everything else appears to work out of box. Cool.

To be honest, I’d rather have a new Mac. (Like Tim.) My plan had been to sell the iBook and apply the $300 toward the cost of an iMac. But pending such time as I actually sell this one, I might as well be using it.

We had a power outage here the other day. Afterward, everything came back up except (it appears) the NIC in my Linux machine. I spent a couple of hours figuring out that it was the only casualty (difficult at first, since it’s the machine from which I do most of my admin). Bummer.

But the good news is that these days an Intel 10/100/1000 Mbps NIC costs 30 bucks. Back when I worked on a 1 Mbps NIC (1986-ish) it cost $595. My employer was trying to build a low-cost version for only $295 but eventually they threw in the towel because they figured they couldn’t make any money at that price.

Anyway, blogging will be even less frequent for a few days until the NIC arrives.

I drove down to the office supply store and bought a new USB thumb drive, viz., an Ativa U3 smart drive. I ferry data back and forth from home to work with one of these, and it would often fill up. That’s not likely to happen with the new one, which has 2GB capacity. (Actually a little less; it’s that 10^3 vs. 2^10 business again.

Whenever I insert the drive into my USB port, I get two devices mounted: a read-only CD-ROM, plus the writable FAT-formatted disc. The stuff on the “CD-ROM” is apparently what U3 is all about: some kind of automatic backup software I can’t use since I don’t have windows. (Like I care; I doubt I’d like it as much as I like rsync.)

Anyhoo. It’s the sort of thing that makes you realize how much you take for granted. Like filesystems that don’t suck, for example, the way FAT does. Or rsync. Or not being in that whole preloaded-crippleware ecosystem.

I am in the middle of a new project (more later) that has me doing some stuff at the command line. I do the bulk of my work at the command line, even on the mac, because it’s so much easier to do things with a command line than with point-and-click interfaces.

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For some reason the Ubuntu Linux distribution (or possibly Debian, on which it is based) doesn’t lie about /bin/sh. Fedora used to lie, and pretend that /bin/bash was /bin/sh. That way your stock /bin/sh still had functions and other post-Version 7 Bourne Shell features in your stock shell. But, as I say, Ubuntu doesn’t do that.
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I’ve had trouble with Fedora pretty much forever, despite having used Red Hat since version 4, back in the day. I could never figure out how to set up the yum feature, and ever since I moved to FC6 I couldn’t get package updates or anything.

So, about a year after the grass started looking greener over there, I moved to Ubuntu. I’m running 6.10 (“Edgy Eff” or something like that). So far, I couldn’t be happier.