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Jason Haslup
jason at haslup dot com

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Sun, 27 Jan 2008

More iMac Talk
blog

Ok... more on the iMac because it gets better and better.

I've switched things up a bit and I'm not using the glossy 20" display as my primary monitor. At first I was hesitant about the glossy display, but now I kind of like it.

I did some work this evening... rdesktop'd to my machine at work. It was fullscreen on the 24" display so it was even better than being at work (where I "only" have 2 1280 x 1024 displays).

I did have an issue that's worth talking about, though. When I first connected to my work machine tonight it behaved as if the Windows key was always down. I'd type a 'd' and my desktop would show. Weird. At first I thought it was my rdesktop client... it was, after all, a beta version from Microsoft. After disconnecting and restarting several times, though, it was still working. No preferences found for "Lock Windows Key", so I was stumped.

I decided to try out the non-beta client from Microsoft. So I grabbed it and fired it up. Same problem. Ugh. I was starting to worry that my dreams of a mac-only environment were lost.

I searched out another client... there's one called 'Cords' for the Mac on sourceforge, so I fired it up. It has a neat interface, not as feature-full as the Microsoft one, but nice overall. Same problem.

Ok, I'm no dummy, so I figured it was the client. I rebooted my machine at work. Fired up my original 2.0 beta client from Microsoft. Problem solved! Hooray!

I worked for a while as I enjoyed listening to iTunes (George Winston, then Imogen Heap).

And now comes the fun part... I disconnected from work and fired up my brand-spankin new copy of EyeTV 3.0. It's software that controls the USB TV Tuner I pulled out from the garage. It's very nice... it includes a "free" account to TitanTV which provides a channel guide list as well as a nifty feature that allows me to setup programs to record remotely on their web interface (like Tivo).

I had setup an episode of Mythbusters to be recorded, and it, of course, worked great. Pretty good quality, too, especially considering it's just analog cable. One cool thing is that I'm watcing the episode of Mythbusters I recorded while keeping tabs on Sportscenter which is coming in live from the tuner. Those two windows populate just a small portion of of 24" display.

And finally... I'm typing all of this up in emacs (of course) being displayed from my real linux machine using Apple's provided X11 app. Very nice. Someday I'll get emacs going on the mac, just haven't yet.

And finally... Peggle is a pretty fun game.

Fri, 25 Jan 2008

Back to the Mac!
blog

Well I took the plunge and bought back into the land of Apples. I got an iMac today. Short version: it's awesome. Long version: keep reading.

First the details... I got the 20" 2.4ghz model with just 1gb (4gb is on order from crucial.com) and a 320gb drive. I also picked up a DVI adapter so I could use my Dell 24" display along with the internal 20". And I threw in VMware Fusion because my goal was to get rid of both my linux and windows computers and just use the iMac.

As expected, setting the iMac up was a piece of cake. It took longer to clear off my desk then it did getting the mac up and running and even updated. Very nice.

I installed VMware Fusion and immediately fired up a new Ubuntu installation for my linux virtual machine. I've been running Gentoo for the past five or so years, but I decided that I was sick of compiling everything. I almost did a debian install (because I've been quite pleased with it on my laptop), but I went with Ubuntu since it's based on debian and is highly recommended

Anyhow, that got up and running pretty quickly (and fully updated). Fusion is kind of nice... it can take over a full monitor if you're running more than one, so I have it running full screen on the 20" glossy display. Nice.

One of the biggest things I wanted to figure out was how to best login to work. I do a lot (too much?) of work from home and that means a login to my Windows machine at work. (It's easiest just to rdesktop to that machine... it's fast and it's just like I'm there.)

The first thing to solve was firing up an ipsec VPN to work. We use Cisco's client (although cvpn on linux works fine), so I tracked down a Leopard-compatible version and installed it. Voila! It worked with the profile that work gave me. Step one complete!

Now I had to find a remote desktop client. Well who would have such a thing? Microsoft, of course! And I gotta tell you... the new beta version of their 2.0 rdesktop client is quite nice. It, too, goes full screen on my secondary display and logs me right into work.

And with that -- I have just about the perfect setup. I'm in the process of migrating data now... gotta get all my settings, documents, music, movies, etc... I also setup Time Machine on an external drive so I can get backups going, too.

Anyhow, I'm up way too late messing around so I gotta get to bed. Pretty pleased with my purchase, though... I'm looking forward to getting back into the mac again.

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