Oracle AppsLab - Latest Comments in OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

jkuramot — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:44:12 -0000

Very true, and with Apple, you don't have to inspect the BIOS to get the real story about what's under the hood.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

Warren Baird — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:33:25 -0000

The problem with PC's is that the "same hardware" isn't. My laptop is a dell d410, and when I was offered it through work, I checked the linux hardware compatibility pages, and it was listed as having a fully supported wireless chipset (Don't remember if it was intel or atheros).

When I got mine however, it had a broadcom chipset, so I had months of futzing with it before I could get wireless working reliably. Fortunately Broadcom support has improved a lot since then.

The problem is that unless you roll your own hardware, you generally have no idea what mobo, chipset, video, etc you are going to get if you go with a big name box...

IMO that's one of the advantages of Apple - they don't just shove whatever's cheapest that week in the box, you get very consistent hardware from machine to machine...

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

jkuramot — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 23:16:22 -0000

Rich and I have proven that even w/the same hardware, you can't always assume everything works the same, e.g. Compiz.

Of course, that's possibly a user error thing on my part too.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

assaf — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:06:54 -0000

I do have to say in all fairness that I wasn't using a Dell or a ThinkPad, and judging by my coworkers, life is easier if you stick with the popular models.

Stuff that has worked for a while (i.e. for older models, I have a couple at home delegate to server) never broke. It's only recent models I had problem with, and with the less common or recently introduced components.

Suspend/resume was on again, off again, on again, off again, probably because the new Intel chipset. So while the cycles were very quick, over the course of a year you get the same down time as Vista.

It was definitely worse than OS X, which just works, but Apple doesn't give you much of choice in hardware, and I did exercise that right when picking a PC to run Linux.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

jkuramot — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:44:38 -0000

Hmm, well, I've not been using long enough to comment, but so far, things seem pretty stable (knocking on wood), even after several updates.

Overall, I like the shorter release cycle for core stuff. You can also build a system and keep it the same forever, no annoying critical update warnings. XP and OS X seem to have a lot of those, and you always wonder how important they really are.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

assaf — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:26:00 -0000

I don't know about that. I used Fedora, you Kernel and core updates almost every week, much faster than Windows or OS X.

But then some updates would break sound, or resume (other updates would break suspend), or the fn keys would stop working, something would go wrong and only get fixed a few releases later.

So while things get fixed really quick, they also get broken again (and again) that overall I think I was worse off than waiting longer on a non-regressing release cycle.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

jkuramot — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:00:20 -0000

Will do and vice versa. Another plus for Linux, frequent updates to the core features and more major releases. So, problems tend to resolve more quickly than with packaged for profit O/S.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

Warren Baird — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:51:13 -0000

well - if you find a solution to the multiple monitor thing - definitely let me know. I've heard that the Xorg people are making strides in that direction - but I don't think they've solved the problem yet...

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

jkuramot — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:08:34 -0000

Exactly my top problem now. I had XP working on a dual monitor setup, but Ubuntu has no idea how to make that work. I had to start fresh with a new xorg.conf b/c it got so borked.

Even now, it's a bit cranky about changing resolutions.

OS X, no problems at all with the laptop screen plus a monitor, even better than XP, which always reset itself when I rebooted, probably a DVI/VGA thing.

So, some things are very frustrating, while others just work. I hadn't used Linux since Red Hat in 99 so this was a huge improvement for me. I love Ubuntu.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

Warren Baird — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:32:55 -0000

I think my experience has somewhat mirrored Rich's --- I've used linux since the bad-old-days of kernel 0.9.x on a 386, and I must admit that when I moved to a macbook pro for my personal machine - I didn't miss *at all* the mucking around with config files, and recompiling kernel modules I had to do on linux.

That being said, it is true that Ubuntu is getting closer and closer to the point where you don't need to mess about too much. but it still has a long way to go.

Just one small example - external monitors. I can plug my mbp into an external monitor, and after a moment my desktop automatically grows to include the new monitor, and I can continue working. it almost always guesses the right resolution, and it's easy to tell it the orientation, and it remembers the orientation and resolution if I connect to a similar monitor later.

With Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 at least), the only approach I've found that works is to edit the Xorg.conf file to have configurations and layouts for all my monitors - and then I have to kill my X session and start a new X session manually with the correct layout. Not my idea of 'usable'.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

jkuramot — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:04:40 -0000

We are quickly becoming the go-to resource for geeking out at Oracle, not that that's a bad thing, just funny ha-ha.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

manalang — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:22:48 -0000

I'd love to see if you can get this to work. I spent many hours trying to get this to work by installing from source and applying Oracle's certs to no avail. I think it had something to do with a failed hybrid implementation... please post a comment if you get it to work.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

manalang — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:18:18 -0000

I spent considerable time trying to get vpnc to work on Oracle's Cisco VPN concentrators without luck. First of all, the vpnc that Ubuntu has in its repo wasn't compiled with SSL support. So, I had to compile from source... and even after that, I couldn't get it to work with Oracle's certs/encryption. I'd love to see if anyone at Oracle has actually gotten it to work.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

Warren Baird — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:09:06 -0000

actually - vpnc can connect to Cisco VPN. Out of the box it won't work with Oracle's VPN, since the support for certificates is turned off, but I understand that if you build from source and turn on certificate support it works fine with Oracle's VPN. I plan on trying it sometime soon - I'll let you know if it works.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

jkuramot — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:05:04 -0000

Heh, licensing, another reason to go Linux.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

oraclebase — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:20:04 -0000

I'm not saying Vista is the better choice of Windows. XP is leaner, faster and a bit neater. It's just I have a proper license for Vista on that laptop, and I'm not into breaking the law these days. :)

Cheers

Tim...

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

jkuramot — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:51:04 -0000

I thought so too, since it's not like the laptop is ancient. I have Intel 945GM inside the Dell. I trolled around the Intertubes and tried some stuff recommended on the Compiz wiki and a few other places. No dice. Oh well, it was only eye candy.

A friend of mine is planning to buy a new Mini and hook it to his 1080p 50" LCD TV as a monitor. Should be awesome. I'm very happy with my 2nd generation Macbook, the white one. I upgraded the memory aftermarket, paying a quarter of what they wanted installed by Apple. It does everything I need, with a few exceptions.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

jkuramot — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:45:41 -0000

The rotting over time is exactly why I finally bit the bullet and moved to Ubuntu. At a certain point, you can't get back to the performance you had initially, even with a defrag.

My Dell is way faster running VMs on Ubuntu than it was running them on XP.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

jkuramot — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:43:06 -0000

Funny "does more of the things I need, with less hassle" sums up nicely, with the emphasis on hassle. I've only run Vista a bit on a VM, but it seemed very heavy, as do all Windows O/S compared to Linux and Mac. Still no VPN issues, dual monitors worked mostly fine, etc.

Good point about h/w, supporting more kinds does mean exponentially more driver work.

After the latest move, I'm trying to stay more cloud/backup/VM centric to ensure that I can lose the box and still be fine.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

jkuramot — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:36:46 -0000

That is weird and indicative of the Linux experience. Rich said we couldn't use vpnc; someone suggested it on one of my series of posts about my XP-Ubuntu move in early July. Rich ran Ubuntu for a long time, so I figure he tried to make it work.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

AmblestonDack — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 07:46:05 -0000

Hmm interesting that you cannot get your Intel gfx card to run Compiz. I have an old Fujitsu Siemens laptop from 2006 and I have no problems with the Intel hardware inside. I also have Compiz and AWN running on an old nVidia GeForce MX 4 with no issues to. What is the Intel hardware inside your Dell?

I hope to one day purchase an Apple Mac, I kinda like the idea of the Mini or maybe the entry level MacBook, but I agree with Mr Shuttleworth that the Linux community should be emulating Apple's approach rather than Redmond's.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

andymurd — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 05:10:22 -0000

That hardware advantage is huge.

I use OS X, Windows and Ubuntu and I find that I spend similar amounts of time tweaking Windows & Ubuntu but none on OS X. Apple's hardware restrictions mean that I buy far fewer hardware upgrades so that has a big effect.

That said, I've found that any Windows install seems to "rot" over time. Taking longer to boot, using more and more memory and gaining conflicting DLLs. This just doesn't happen with Ubuntu.

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

oraclebase — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:29:09 -0000

One advantage Apple have over Windows and Linux is they only have to worry about a small amount of hardware drivers. If they started to sell OS X for install on all x86 & x86-64 kit they would have to write thousands of drivers. The biggest gripe I have with Linux (even Ubuntu) is the limited number of divers.

I've switched between Linux and Windows several times on my laptop. A few days ago I switched back to Vista. I don't like it, but it does more of the things I need, with less hassle.

I switched from CentOS5 to Ubuntu on my PC. I'm coming to the end of my love affair with Ubuntu. I think I'm going to switch back to CentOS5. It's more solid and that machine is more of a server, so it's a better match.

As I've said before, stick to VMs and your transitions between OSes are very easy. :)

Cheers

Tim...

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

NickF — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 02:19:39 -0000

Weird. We use Ciscos as well, and the Cisco clients are recommended too. But with the proper configuration files, I have been using vpnc to connect to the Cisco VPN server with no problem. I wonder why can't you...

Re: OS X, Ubuntu and Other Fun Stuff

jkuramot — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:54:33 -0000

Good points. The argument is a bit different for personal vs. business users, which (duh) is where OS X has made the most headway. Personal users are more likely to use what's provided and not have s/w requirements.

So, again we launch into the what's best for enterprise discussion. Personally, I think OS X and Linux are good enough to compete with Microsoft, but there will always be room for multiple O/S flavors.

Further adding to the argument that VMs rule and everyone should have multiple O/S installed, if only to see what could be. If everyone used each flavor (one Linux distro for the sake of debate), we'd pull out what we liked and disliked and push our primary/favorite O/S to do better, also pushing the others to do better.

Competition is good.

I wish my Dell from 2006 would run Compiz. The Intel drivers don't want to cooperate.