BarneyBlog » osx

Fink for Tiger

barneyb — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 01:51:27 +0000

Last night I finally got Fink
installed on my newly Tiger-ed PowerBook. Opted for the binary
install this time, and it worked like a charm. Less than 40
minutes to go from noticing that a 10.4-specific release had been made
to having it all set up with X, Gnucash, the GImP, and the GNU
FileUtils package (for the color-aware ls command) all installed.

A Non-OSX PowerBook?

barneyb — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 18:08:20 +0000

My PowerBook saga continues. I thought that I'd come up with a
pretty stable system last week: install 10.3 from the install CDs and
don't apply ANY updates. Some of the updaters would be nice to
have, but at least with bare-bones 10.3 allowed me to do things like
boot up. Unfortunately, last night, it decided that it didn't
like running stock 10.3 anymore either.

So now I'm looking at alternative OSes for the machine. Gentoo
Linux seems to be the best candidate from my brief looking. Has
anyone had any experience running Linux on a PowerBook G4, and can
offer tips, tricks, or other guidance?

Me and My Feisty Mac

barneyb — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 06:51:49 +0000

I swear, my Powerbook is the feistiest computer ever. I just
installed the 2005-001 security update, rebooted, and Finder refuses to
run. It just loads and crashes at about 2 second intervals,
indefinitely. Most of my other apps work (FireFox, Dreamweaver,
etc.), but some don't (iTerm, Adium), so I don't know what's up.

Last time it got massively pissy like this, it was bad memory.
But the clever guys down at Apple opted to use the TINIEST screws
imaginable, and I don't have a screwdriver that will even come CLOSE to
fitting in them, so pulling the sticks out to check isn't an
option. So now I gotta either live without Finder and a decent
terminal (because Terminal just sucks), or go fork $30 for some schmuck
to unscrew three little screws for me so I can pull out my memory
sticks and see if that fixes it. Needless to say, after
yesterday's experience, I'm loth to let any "presumed expert" come
close to my machine.

As nice as it is to have that big ol' screen, have *nix under the hood,
I've gotten to the point where I'd rather be running Windows, because
at least it's stable when it's taken care of. And how friggin'
pissed does it make me to actually say that.

iTerm Rules

barneyb — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 08:03:50 +0000

I long ago discovered iTerm, a slick little Terminal replacement for OSX. Among other things, it lets you have tabbed windows, just like any decent browser, which is handy for managing the swarm of SSH and MySQL sessions I usually have open. What I just noticed today was that you can tear a tab off into it's own new window, which is way slick. Only problem: you can't move tabs between windows at will. Regardless, it's a handy feature to a very functional piece of software that no OSX user should be without.