I’ve been putting off upgrading the trusty MacBookPro to Leopard for a while. I use fink and the Unix-ey side of things quite a bit, and really wanted that to be stable. Well, turns out many of the apps I’d like to try out are now Leopard only. So, upgrade time.
But, with a twist. I’ve long lamented the quality of packaging on the Mac, fink and macports both have their failures and apple’s own package handling is very sad. Enter a new challenger: Hardy Heron - Ubuntu. I’ve used Linux in one form or another for what seems like forever. And, I miss it. So, I want to see how I like the current offering from Ubuntu.
I’ve setup the MBP to have two equal installations, each around 70G in size. I’ve used eEFIt to handle the bootloader issues. I’ve started to use this guide to get started on fixing things. Apparently, I have a 3rd rev MBP so I had a few issues with wifi early on. I’ll blog more about the tech details if I think other people would find them interesting. We’ll see.
What do I really expect?
Despite having more experience with Linux overall, I really think Leopard might win for me. There are a couple applications I’m not sure I can learn to live without. But, at the same time, I really, really miss a decent environment for using Unix apps. It’s also quite likely that I’ll end up continuing to dual boot, living mostly in Linux but booting to the OS X side for the few programs I can easily transition.
Bets?
