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Caution.. n00b Mac OS X user at large.

June 1, 2006

Recently I purchased a new MacBook Pro from Apple. I got the 15.4" model with the 2.16 GHz duo core processor. I got an L270 Logitech mouse, and a very nice Brenthaven case. This machine is very fast. I'm even beginning to get used to the weirdness of a few things:

Weirdness #1

Safari seems like a good web browser but I'm not much into RSS feeds and as a web developer I prefer Firefox due to all the many developer plugins and extensions that are available. Developing web pages on a Mac using Firefox is risky because Firefox for Mac is not bug free by any stretch of the imagination. On many web pages I visit, words that are marked up in one fashion or another overlap the text just before them. I've tried many different fonts and font settings and even a clean reinstall of Firefox. I have no idea what else to try to fix the issue. It's just yucky. It makes me really not want to trust any CSS work I do.

Weirdness #2

I can no longer edit bookmarks in Firefox unless I open the bookmark manager and work inside there. On Linux and windoze I can right click on a bookmark from within the bookmark toolbar and choose 'Properties' to edit it in-place. And yes, I have a two button mouse.

Weirdness #3

The Terminal that comes with Mac OS X does not let you use delete and backspace at the same time. There is a setting 'Delete button sends backspace' that reverses the direction the delete buttons works towards. Changing this setting improves the Terminal app itself but then breaks the backspace/delete behavior in vim. I can choose to fix either the Terminal app or vim but not both. Guess I'll be getting used to using TextMate sooner rather than later.

Weirdness #4

Trying to find a better terminal I installed KDE so I could gain access to my old favorite 'konsole'. On Mac OS X you have to run an X server to run any KDE apps. That part was no problem but when I would alt-tab away from an app in hopes of landing back on the konsole, I don't. Instead I would land on the X server app itself which konsole runs under. The only way I can find to gain focus on the konsole app is to click on it directly with my mouse. Boo!

Weirdness #5

Curiosity finally got the best of me on this one.. I finally gave in and tried the File Vault feature for my login/account. It seemed like a good idea at the time, an extra layer of security, etc. The encryption process was long but it completed with no errors and thing worked well for a few days. But one thing that was really annoying was having it ask me if I wanted to regain my wasted free space at every boot. It's not that I reboot a lot, but when I do I don't want to have to wait. So after a few days I decided to revert back to not using the File Vault feature on my account. After the long decryption process finished, all my Desktop and Firefox preferences were missing. My bookmarks were all gone and nothing I tried to change in my Firefox preferences would save across a restart. I ended up deleting my Firefox profile and starting it up again from scratch. I had to reset all of my preferred desktop settings.

Other things to note:

World of Warcraft will not install on a case sensitive Mac file system. No idea why that would matter but it does. When I first got my new Mac, a co-worker suggested I switch over to the case sensitive file system because as a developer I would want that. Fine, but then when I tried to install WoW I could always hear the sound of the installer but I could never actually see it come up on the desktop. Two reinstalls later I now have the game working. I had to dig deep into the WoW forum posts before I found this info about file system case sensitivity. It should certainly be in a FAQ somewhere.

I cannot find any way to mount a Novell share. I gotta believe this is possible somehow as I can mount Novell shares under other *nix flavors with no issues. Mounting Samba shares is very simple however. It's crazy.. my work-around is that I am remounting via Samba, a Novell share first mounted in Linux.

Quicksilver freezes my system on boot. The QS logo comes blasting into my desktop and freezes at about half-size, then my system stops. I noticed the weird behavior early on but then this one reboot it took me 4 attempts to actually get booted up. After that I got rid of Quicksilver. I guess I'm special since several people recommended this app to me in the first place. Guess I'll be using locate and grep and what-not.

On a positive note I am very happy with my purchase. I have found the Mac OS X to be very polished and easy to use. The included software is plentyful and the port system can provide me with quite a few *nix titles I am used to using on my Debian boxes. I know.. I can't bring myself to say 'boxen', it's just too weird.

Tags:

macbook, pro

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