undertakingyou

I have written quite recently how I have been using Mac OS X as my primary OS over the last month or so. In the times past I have failed at this in large part because I have not given Mac OS a chance. I found myself making quick judgements about the nuances that existed and then hated everything. This go around I am affording more of a chance here. Although I have been uncomfortable to a certain degree because I am used to all the FOSS tools that I have come to love and rely on. But there are a few things that have really been able to help me keep it together as I make this transition.

My Tomboy Notes replacement. I love Tomboy notes, and having something close to take a quick note. Mac OS stickies doesn’t even come close to it. After some searching I found Evernote, which really is awesome. I like it enough that I upgraded to the premium account. I think Evernote will replace my default note taking app permanently.

For chatting I have had to replace Irssi with bitlbee. I chose to use two things here, even though I could use one. The first is Adium, which is a great multi-protocol chat client akin to Pidgin. It even has a bird as its icon, a duck, that can be the color of your choosing. I use that for google talk, and a jabber account I have for school. The second chatting replacement is Macirrsi. I used port to install Irssi, but the terminal in Mac is still … not the best. Macirssi gives the power of Irssi but without the headaches of mac terminal.

For a text editor I like to use vim. Vim is available in Mac OS, but I have found in Linux that sometimes that it is very nice to have the extra features of a GTK application with the menu’s and what not. In comes MacVim  which provides basically the same functions as gvim. I still have vim in the terminal, which we all know is awesome.

OpenVPN is a great open source VPN solution that we use at work. With ubuntu I just go to the terminal and as root run openvpn with my .conf file or I would set up a VPN connection with NetworkManager and just connect. In Mac OS there is a very eligant solution with the use of Tunnelblick. Seems to be more fickle with configuration file options, and there are some more steps in setting up a connection. Otherwise there is a simple connect on demand option that keeps things going smoothly.

On ubuntu I really liked using gnome do for quick startup of applications. Gnome do is based on the native Mac OS Quicksilver, which is actually quite awesome. Gnome Do has done a great job in replicating it. Because Mac OS didn’t have any kind of menu until recently, Quicksilver is a must so you can access things easily.

There are some apps that I have not found yet a suitable replacement.

• Revelation, password keeper. I have keepassx but it isn’t as good.
• Banshee, a great music player. The current Mac OS version won’t run for me, and iTunes just can’t hold a candle to it.
• A decent terminal. The default terminal is still the best that I have used out of iTerm and Terminator. But there are some drawbacks still with the default terminal.

Normally I don’t do posts on anything windows because, well, I don’t like to use windows. But this one was just frustrating enough that I thought a quick writeup would be good.

I am helping a coworker with their personal laptop. It is a Toshiba something or other and at boot it was saying “Error in reading the disk” (or whatever the message is, you get the point). Knoppix quickly showed that not only is the disk readable and everything there but also the rest of the system works fine. Using knoppix I fixed the windows MBR but to no avail! The silly thing still wouldn’t boot. I popped in the Windows XP CD with the intention of doing a CHKDSK but to my great aggravation, the Toshiba laptop uses a sata controller that doesn’t have a driver in the Windows XP disk. Couldn’t do CHKDSK because it didn’t see a drive. Crap.

After some searches I ran into nLite. A tool to spin up your own XP disk. You can add drivers, files, windows updates, remove windows features and even have pre-installed software. To my great joy I got the driver needed for the intel 82801 SATA controller, spun up my own disk, and now this laptop is merrily performing the CHKDSK /P which HOPEFULLY fixes this problem.

Some things to note with nLite: Won’t work under wine worth a crap. Had to fire up my Windows VM to make it work. Otherwise it is pretty straight forward. Tell it where your windows disk is and where you want to store stuff on your hard drive. It will copy the windows files over and then give you a nice list of options to customize things. Seems as though sky is the limit, although I didn’t try it past adding some drivers. At the end it will make for you an .ISO which you can burn at your leisure. From there you are on your way to getting stuff done … even though it is windows.

The other day I had an HP laptop with some problems. I sent it back, using their HP care stuff. I was pleasantly surprised with how fast they shipped everything, at their expence, and got everything back to me. But as I started the machine they didn’t have the wireless driver installed. Using their website they said that I had to have a broadcom card, and so I installed their provided drivers. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a broadcom card. They were wrong. All I had was the Vendor ID and Hardware ID.

After some searching I found http://www.pcidatabase.com/ . This website can just search by Vendor ID or Hardware ID and give you the information that you need to get stuff fixed. I have used it a couple of times and found it very helpful.