Hello All, My name is Simon and I am a long time Mac user who has had it up to his eyeballs with Apple's general contempt of its customers. I have just purchased what I hope will be my last Mac ever - a MacBook Air. I have done this as I am working on my PhD in Jurisprudence at Southampton University and need a solidly built yet highly portable laptop for research and writing. The MacBook has the best physical build but it leaves me grinding my teeth that I am once again stuck with Mac OSX.
The reason I needed a new laptop was that my old MacBook 4,1 is dying. This model has always suffered from an overheating problem IMO and this has killed my hard drive. Since I have a new Mac coming to finish my PhD on I now have a 4 year old, well battered Mac to play with. My aim therefore is to buy a new hard disk (currently leaning towards a 64 GB SSD) and install it and then install Ubuntu 11.10. I have long known of the basic superiority of the Linux OS and wish to make the jump now. If I can get Ubuntu running on my old Mac I will consider installing it on my MacBook Air as well. I won't be in a position to start working on my old Mac for a couple of weeks but once I am I hope to be a semi regular contributor to this group. In the meantime can I just ask: does anyone use Ubuntu (or any Linux distribution) on Mac hardware? I realize that it is far more common to run on a pc but as my Mac has an i386 processor I hope it shouldn't be too difficult (EFI versus BIOS issues notwithstanding). I am hoping to avoid using a dual boot set up as the HD I am looking at is limited in its capacity. Anyway, just wanted to say hello for now. I hope everyone is having a great weekend. Regards, Simon PS - has anyone here ever read Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning Was the Command Line"? -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday 2012-03-06 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:[email protected] How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
