Re: [dev] Re: How do you cope with OSX? (if at all)
On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 5:37 AM, wrote: > When I need a pointing device, I would anytime prefer touchpad with > decent configuration, mainly (1) two finger scroll (or emulation of > 2finger), (2) click by tap and double-click by 2-finger-tap (i don't > know what's the correct name), which in addition renders the buttons > below useless. In my opinion, this allows for effective use without > disturbing the keyboard posture of the fingers. Without 2-finger > scrolling and click-by-tap a touchpad is as much pain as nipple. I hate every single scrolling method except pgup/pgdown and EmulateWheel -- and EmulateWheel sucks too unless it's with a trackpoint. I don't double click. -- # Kurt H Maier
Re: [dev] Re: How do you cope with OSX? (if at all)
* Benjamin R. Haskell [2011-03-19 15:56]: > I don't think I've ever met a ThinkPad owner who didn't prefer the > nipple over a touchpad once they were used to it. Now you know one. When I need a pointing device, I would anytime prefer touchpad with decent configuration, mainly (1) two finger scroll (or emulation of 2finger), (2) click by tap and double-click by 2-finger-tap (i don't know what's the correct name), which in addition renders the buttons below useless. In my opinion, this allows for effective use without disturbing the keyboard posture of the fingers. Without 2-finger scrolling and click-by-tap a touchpad is as much pain as nipple. That said, I love my x200s at work: - usually the temp is below 38 C with Ubuntu without gnome with X - screen resolution is great - it is as light as my eee netbook - nearly 8h of battery life (never needed longer than 5h, so I can't report whether it really goes up to 8) - no touch pad, but for the small fraction of time needing a clicking device I can live with the strange red thing. Btw, eee has a great touch pad toggle button. cheers, -- stanio_
Re: [dev] Re: How do you cope with OSX? (if at all)
On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 3:56 PM, Benjamin R. Haskell wrote: > Personally, I completely disable the touchpad on any laptop I use whenever > possible. Otherwise my wrists always unintentionally activate it. > > I don't think I've ever met a ThinkPad owner who didn't prefer the nipple > over a touchpad once they were used to it. A long time ago when I didn't have any money at all but still wanted a laptop, I very carefully made a list of things that were important to me. "No touchpad" was on that list. Ended up with a second hand ThinkPad X40. Lightweight, sturdy, discrete, runs cool enough without needing a fan, quality keyboard. I still use it daily and it's 7 years old.
Re: [dev] Re: How do you cope with OSX? (if at all)
On Sat, 19 Mar 2011, pancake wrote: On 18/03/2011, at 18:42, Kurt H Maier wrote: I'll stick with thinkpads. The keyboards are nicer, I don't have to paw at a touchpad, [...] Paw at touchpad? What do 'paw' means? Paw is the word used for most animal's feet. Used as a verb, it implies that the action is somehow primitive or basic. So, perfectly appropriate for a touchpad (blech). Personally, I completely disable the touchpad on any laptop I use whenever possible. Otherwise my wrists always unintentionally activate it. I don't think I've ever met a ThinkPad owner who didn't prefer the nipple over a touchpad once they were used to it. -- Ben
Re: [dev] Re: How do you cope with OSX? (if at all)
Inlined reply On 18/03/2011, at 18:42, Kurt H Maier wrote: > On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 1:11 PM, pancake wrote: >> - power management not as good as in osx > > this can be tweaked, and osx has an extremely naive time-remaining > alogrithm. it frequently reported seven hours of life and then > crapped its pants after four. I got nearly an hour more out of the > battery under Slackware than OS X. Thats one of the things i want to test.. But in linux i have the same battery time prediction changes. Its a hardware device who gives this info. But surely.. Linux+dwm should save some battery. Will switch asap > >> - screen is not normal rgb setup (you have to add a specifix color scheme >> for X11) > > this is a load of crap. it's just a regular LCD, acer uses the same > models in some laptops. > Im talking about the last mba model. Is this valid for it? >> - wireless driver ( broadcom) is pure shit. It mostly works, but in >> powersave mode it just crashes the kernel. > > absolutely true. and apple did not use a regular pcie chip here, it's > some proprietary bullshit in the hinge. > Agree. Broadcom sucks >> In fact i think that mba is the best laptop atm for price/quality/weight if >> you like smart laptops without innecessary stuff like dvd drives or 999 >> plugs. > > except for the fact that once you begin to do any real work with it it > overheats, and then it shuts down a core and things begin to crash > (unless you're using linux, where it deals with the core shutdown more > gracefully). Also the USB plugs are so close together that once you > plug in a 3g dongle you can't use the other port. shitty design by > idiots. > That depends on the kind of uses you make w/ the laptop.. Im not used to plug anything to the laptop. I use bt for tethering and wifi for data transfers.. So usb is not that important for me. Default kbd and touchpad are good enought to not need to plug any external replacement. My primary uses are coding, chat, browse. And for this, the mba is more than what i need. On overhead.. I have had no pb with it. The first mba model was hot.. But the 2nd generation works much better. I use ports, have 3vm running (compile farm for w32, lin32,64,osx and it never get as hot as any other laptop i used.. And for stability.. I never had a crash for temperature.. In fact the few crashes (kernel) i had was a virtualbox fault. I never shutdown th laptop. Its always in suspend mode, and in this state i can keep big uptimes without any noticeable performance or stability issues. So i understand you are talking about the 1st model.. >> The sad thing is that there is no other option a part from Apple atm. Sony >> is putting prices pretty high for their vaio, hp, acer.. Just suck as real >> laptops (its ok if you dont plan to move them), an lenovo.. Well, they are >> great, but i always find them like designed by a militar. > > I'll stick with thinkpads. The keyboards are nicer, I don't have to > paw at a touchpad, and there is actual warranty support where they in > fact fix problems, which is something apple's never really mastered. > Paw at touchpad? What do 'paw' means? I have never used the warranty, things get broken after warranty expire time usually. So i dont care about it. >> Not to say that nowadays there is no manufacturer that sells any laptop >> without windows (apart from apple, which ships OSX). > > Thinkpads can be ordered with FreeDOS installed and no windows. > Oh, cool. Didnt knew that. In fact a thinkpad was my other option when choosing a laptop > > > -- > # Kurt H Maier >
Re: [dev] Re: How do you cope with OSX? (if at all)
On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 1:11 PM, pancake wrote: > - power management not as good as in osx this can be tweaked, and osx has an extremely naive time-remaining alogrithm. it frequently reported seven hours of life and then crapped its pants after four. I got nearly an hour more out of the battery under Slackware than OS X. > - screen is not normal rgb setup (you have to add a specifix color scheme for > X11) this is a load of crap. it's just a regular LCD, acer uses the same models in some laptops. > - wireless driver ( broadcom) is pure shit. It mostly works, but in powersave > mode it just crashes the kernel. absolutely true. and apple did not use a regular pcie chip here, it's some proprietary bullshit in the hinge. > In fact i think that mba is the best laptop atm for price/quality/weight if > you like smart laptops without innecessary stuff like dvd drives or 999 plugs. except for the fact that once you begin to do any real work with it it overheats, and then it shuts down a core and things begin to crash (unless you're using linux, where it deals with the core shutdown more gracefully). Also the USB plugs are so close together that once you plug in a 3g dongle you can't use the other port. shitty design by idiots. > The sad thing is that there is no other option a part from Apple atm. Sony is > putting prices pretty high for their vaio, hp, acer.. Just suck as real > laptops (its ok if you dont plan to move them), an lenovo.. Well, they are > great, but i always find them like designed by a militar. I'll stick with thinkpads. The keyboards are nicer, I don't have to paw at a touchpad, and there is actual warranty support where they in fact fix problems, which is something apple's never really mastered. > Not to say that nowadays there is no manufacturer that sells any laptop > without windows (apart from apple, which ships OSX). Thinkpads can be ordered with FreeDOS installed and no windows. -- # Kurt H Maier
Re: [dev] Re: How do you cope with OSX? (if at all)
A friend of me managed to install ubuntu plus some hacks to make it work. The issues were: - power management not as good as in osx - screen is not normal rgb setup (you have to add a specifix color scheme for X11) - wireless driver ( broadcom) is pure shit. It mostly works, but in powersave mode it just crashes the kernel. A part from that the rest of the hw works pretty well. The 11 finger capacitive multitouch pad works too. Im pretty happy with it. Battery life is great, weight is awesome and stability is quite decent. The only thing i miss is some more cpu.. But in a macbookair you cant handle all those features :P its temperature is pretty low. In fact i think that mba is the best laptop atm for price/quality/weight if you like smart laptops without innecessary stuff like dvd drives or 999 plugs. The sad thing is that there is no other option a part from Apple atm. Sony is putting prices pretty high for their vaio, hp, acer.. Just suck as real laptops (its ok if you dont plan to move them), an lenovo.. Well, they are great, but i always find them like designed by a militar. And well, dell is like not pushing any decent laptop for about 2 years.. Too much interest in big sells. Not to say that nowadays there is no manufacturer that sells any laptop without windows (apart from apple, which ships OSX). Dell just lies in their forms. Kinda sad situation.. Buy after 5 years using a dell 420 12".. I had to change 3 times the keyboard because it was broken.. And the battery and charger once. Lets see how the apple keyboard resists my fingers.. In fact im starting to like more the laptop kbd of a mac than the pc ones.. As long as you dont use arrow keys or keypad the key feeling is pretty good. But still have to know how time can i type before having to change it. See inline On 18/03/2011, at 17:30, Isaac Raway wrote: > On Fri, 18 Mar 2011, pancake wrote: > >> At the beggining I was using dwm+xterm on XQuartz, but it was pretty >> inneficient and anoying. >> >> I have not >> found any decent tiling (or even non-tiling) window manager for OSX. So I >> stay in a fullscreen shell and ssh to the linux vm. > > dwm works very, very well for me. The only issue is that you have to rebuild > all your apps to work under x11. So far that hasn't been a blocker for me. > Depends on what you need to use. This setup is very fast, I haven't had any > performance issues. Not sure if this is due to some flaw in XQuartz or not - > I would try X11.app if you want to give it a go again, works really well for > me. > >> to install dwm in osx, you can just replace the /usr/bin/quartz-wm binary >> and kill XQuartz. > > I would say that is not quite optimal, at least if you need to use Aqua apps > regularly - my setup preserves quartz-wm and launches it for clipboard > proxying so it's easy to copy/paste between X11 and Aqua. I didnt knew that quartzwm was proxyfing the clipboard.. I just lived without it. > >> I plan to install linux natively at some point, but it's the work's laptop >> and i dont have much spare time to do this. (it's a macbookair 11") > > Ubuntu works very well and has a setup page for it. Arch has a similarly > detailed page but I can't speak to how well it works on the hardware. > Whatever you go with I would be very interested in hearing about your results > - I want to switch my MB back to a Linux distro at some point. > >> > > On 03/18/11 17:15, Isaac Raway wrote: >> >>> So, I had to join this list because someone sent me this thread this >>> morning. Just so happens I have been doing exactly this... >>> From: Anselm R Garbe >>> Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:23:24 +0100 at work I have to use OSX (on a MacBook Pro 13") for various reasons and wonder if anyone is using dwm in conjunction with OSX? >>> I have a similar environment, although by choice - I prefer mac hardware >>> and have liked Mac OS X quite a bit. I used to run Ubuntu on my MacBook >>> (non-pro) 13" however due to software needs at work I have switched back to >>> Mac OS X. Any recommendations you'd like to share? >>> Oh yes. I use the following setup on two iMacs and a MacBook. >>> I run Apple's X11.app with the dock set to auto hide. I have found >>> fullscreen X11 to be a major pain. It might not be as much of an issue if >>> you never have to use Aqua apps, but I do sometimes so hiding the dock is >>> good enough for me. >>> To do builds you obviously need XCode installed. >>> I am using dwm compiled from the tar ball, works like a champ after you go >>> through a few setup steps. This is my modified set of instructions to get >>> dwm working under X11.app: https://gist.github.com/864399 >>> For general software I have Fink as well as MacPorts installed. If you're >>> on 10.6 then you will be building form source in Fink. Sort of a pain but >>> once you build a few large apps (Firefox for instance), everything else >>> will go pretty well. Older versions of OS
Re: [dev] Re: How do you cope with OSX? (if at all)
On Fri, 18 Mar 2011, pancake wrote: At the beggining I was using dwm+xterm on XQuartz, but it was pretty inneficient and anoying. I have not found any decent tiling (or even non-tiling) window manager for OSX. So I stay in a fullscreen shell and ssh to the linux vm. dwm works very, very well for me. The only issue is that you have to rebuild all your apps to work under x11. So far that hasn't been a blocker for me. Depends on what you need to use. This setup is very fast, I haven't had any performance issues. Not sure if this is due to some flaw in XQuartz or not - I would try X11.app if you want to give it a go again, works really well for me. to install dwm in osx, you can just replace the /usr/bin/quartz-wm binary and kill XQuartz. I would say that is not quite optimal, at least if you need to use Aqua apps regularly - my setup preserves quartz-wm and launches it for clipboard proxying so it's easy to copy/paste between X11 and Aqua. I plan to install linux natively at some point, but it's the work's laptop and i dont have much spare time to do this. (it's a macbookair 11") Ubuntu works very well and has a setup page for it. Arch has a similarly detailed page but I can't speak to how well it works on the hardware. Whatever you go with I would be very interested in hearing about your results - I want to switch my MB back to a Linux distro at some point. > On 03/18/11 17:15, Isaac Raway wrote: >> So, I had to join this list because someone sent me this thread this morning. Just so happens I have been doing exactly this... From: Anselm R Garbe Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:23:24 +0100 at work I have to use OSX (on a MacBook Pro 13") for various reasons and wonder if anyone is using dwm in conjunction with OSX? I have a similar environment, although by choice - I prefer mac hardware and have liked Mac OS X quite a bit. I used to run Ubuntu on my MacBook (non-pro) 13" however due to software needs at work I have switched back to Mac OS X. Any recommendations you'd like to share? Oh yes. I use the following setup on two iMacs and a MacBook. I run Apple's X11.app with the dock set to auto hide. I have found fullscreen X11 to be a major pain. It might not be as much of an issue if you never have to use Aqua apps, but I do sometimes so hiding the dock is good enough for me. To do builds you obviously need XCode installed. I am using dwm compiled from the tar ball, works like a champ after you go through a few setup steps. This is my modified set of instructions to get dwm working under X11.app: https://gist.github.com/864399 For general software I have Fink as well as MacPorts installed. If you're on 10.6 then you will be building form source in Fink. Sort of a pain but once you build a few large apps (Firefox for instance), everything else will go pretty well. Older versions of OS X have binary packages available. I can't comment on the quality of those builds since I have been doing everything from source. From fink I obtained and use mc, geany, gedit, and alpine. From MacPorts I obtained bitlbee and irssi. Built a few other things from tar balls such as calc. ./configure, make, make install work in about 90% of cases without any problems at all. Otherwise I use Fink mainly - it seems to have more working packages than MacPorts (ports version of Firefox is ancient and only works on PPC for instance). Don't expect to have a fully functional system for the first day or so working with Fink. Firefox took about 4 or 6 hours to build on my various machines, but had no issues. All that time just so I can run a browser in dwm ;) Make sure you get the latest Java SDK from Apple's website - there are some virtual dependencies in Fink that require this to be installed (a package named something like java-dev is just a stub for the latest SDK available from Apple). That's the basics... I am sure I'm forgeting a bunch of stuff, but it is certainly doable and I actually love the setup - I can still use Word and Photoshop (no comment on that please, it is part of my job), but I can stick to a clean tiling window manager and mainly text mode apps almost all the rest of the time. If you have any questions let me know, I have been using this setup as my primary environment for a couple weeks and I'm loving it.
Re: [dev] Re: How do you cope with OSX? (if at all)
At the beggining I was using dwm+xterm on XQuartz, but it was pretty inneficient and anoying. then I switched to virtualbox+linux in fullscreen and now im using iTerm2 which have support for splits and tabs and keybindings can be configured in a similar way to dwm and fullscreensupport. So .. I use iTerm2 in fullscreen (like in monocle mode) most of the time and then cmd-tab to switch to graphical apps. I have not found any decent tiling (or even non-tiling) window manager for OSX. So I stay in a fullscreen shell and ssh to the linux vm. to install dwm in osx, you can just replace the /usr/bin/quartz-wm binary and kill XQuartz. I plan to install linux natively at some point, but it's the work's laptop and i dont have much spare time to do this. (it's a macbookair 11") On 03/18/11 17:15, Isaac Raway wrote: So, I had to join this list because someone sent me this thread this morning. Just so happens I have been doing exactly this... From: Anselm R Garbe Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:23:24 +0100 at work I have to use OSX (on a MacBook Pro 13") for various reasons and wonder if anyone is using dwm in conjunction with OSX? I have a similar environment, although by choice - I prefer mac hardware and have liked Mac OS X quite a bit. I used to run Ubuntu on my MacBook (non-pro) 13" however due to software needs at work I have switched back to Mac OS X. Any recommendations you'd like to share? Oh yes. I use the following setup on two iMacs and a MacBook. I run Apple's X11.app with the dock set to auto hide. I have found fullscreen X11 to be a major pain. It might not be as much of an issue if you never have to use Aqua apps, but I do sometimes so hiding the dock is good enough for me. To do builds you obviously need XCode installed. I am using dwm compiled from the tar ball, works like a champ after you go through a few setup steps. This is my modified set of instructions to get dwm working under X11.app: https://gist.github.com/864399 For general software I have Fink as well as MacPorts installed. If you're on 10.6 then you will be building form source in Fink. Sort of a pain but once you build a few large apps (Firefox for instance), everything else will go pretty well. Older versions of OS X have binary packages available. I can't comment on the quality of those builds since I have been doing everything from source. From fink I obtained and use mc, geany, gedit, and alpine. From MacPorts I obtained bitlbee and irssi. Built a few other things from tar balls such as calc. ./configure, make, make install work in about 90% of cases without any problems at all. Otherwise I use Fink mainly - it seems to have more working packages than MacPorts (ports version of Firefox is ancient and only works on PPC for instance). Don't expect to have a fully functional system for the first day or so working with Fink. Firefox took about 4 or 6 hours to build on my various machines, but had no issues. All that time just so I can run a browser in dwm ;) Make sure you get the latest Java SDK from Apple's website - there are some virtual dependencies in Fink that require this to be installed (a package named something like java-dev is just a stub for the latest SDK available from Apple). That's the basics... I am sure I'm forgeting a bunch of stuff, but it is certainly doable and I actually love the setup - I can still use Word and Photoshop (no comment on that please, it is part of my job), but I can stick to a clean tiling window manager and mainly text mode apps almost all the rest of the time. If you have any questions let me know, I have been using this setup as my primary environment for a couple weeks and I'm loving it.
[dev] Re: How do you cope with OSX? (if at all)
So, I had to join this list because someone sent me this thread this morning. Just so happens I have been doing exactly this... From: Anselm R Garbe Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:23:24 +0100 at work I have to use OSX (on a MacBook Pro 13") for various reasons and wonder if anyone is using dwm in conjunction with OSX? I have a similar environment, although by choice - I prefer mac hardware and have liked Mac OS X quite a bit. I used to run Ubuntu on my MacBook (non-pro) 13" however due to software needs at work I have switched back to Mac OS X. Any recommendations you'd like to share? Oh yes. I use the following setup on two iMacs and a MacBook. I run Apple's X11.app with the dock set to auto hide. I have found fullscreen X11 to be a major pain. It might not be as much of an issue if you never have to use Aqua apps, but I do sometimes so hiding the dock is good enough for me. To do builds you obviously need XCode installed. I am using dwm compiled from the tar ball, works like a champ after you go through a few setup steps. This is my modified set of instructions to get dwm working under X11.app: https://gist.github.com/864399 For general software I have Fink as well as MacPorts installed. If you're on 10.6 then you will be building form source in Fink. Sort of a pain but once you build a few large apps (Firefox for instance), everything else will go pretty well. Older versions of OS X have binary packages available. I can't comment on the quality of those builds since I have been doing everything from source. From fink I obtained and use mc, geany, gedit, and alpine. From MacPorts I obtained bitlbee and irssi. Built a few other things from tar balls such as calc. ./configure, make, make install work in about 90% of cases without any problems at all. Otherwise I use Fink mainly - it seems to have more working packages than MacPorts (ports version of Firefox is ancient and only works on PPC for instance). Don't expect to have a fully functional system for the first day or so working with Fink. Firefox took about 4 or 6 hours to build on my various machines, but had no issues. All that time just so I can run a browser in dwm ;) Make sure you get the latest Java SDK from Apple's website - there are some virtual dependencies in Fink that require this to be installed (a package named something like java-dev is just a stub for the latest SDK available from Apple). That's the basics... I am sure I'm forgeting a bunch of stuff, but it is certainly doable and I actually love the setup - I can still use Word and Photoshop (no comment on that please, it is part of my job), but I can stick to a clean tiling window manager and mainly text mode apps almost all the rest of the time. If you have any questions let me know, I have been using this setup as my primary environment for a couple weeks and I'm loving it. -- Isaac Raway Senior Developer, Nerdery Interactive Labs isaac.ra...@nerdery.com Web Solutions, Powered By Nerds (http://nerdery.com)
Re: [dev] Re: How do you cope with OSX? (if at all)
I've been wondering why nobody has said it yet:, so... Why don't you quit your job?
[dev] Re: How do you cope with OSX? (if at all)
Anselm R. Garbe writes: > at work I have to use OSX (on a MacBook Pro 13") for various reasons > and wonder if anyone is using dwm in conjunction with OSX? Not dwm, but wmii under XQuartz. You can run XQuartz in fullscreen, but I ran into several problems and now I usually let it run in a separate Space, so you can still quickly switch between X- and Aqua-Applications. Putting osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to quit' in your .xinitrc will also ease the pain a bit. For installing additional tools I use Macports; I've never been very happy with it, but it's better than Fink. -David
