The Butt Ugly Weblog

Confessions of a switcher

OK, opinions so far on the Powerbook (after a few hours of tampering with it) from this Linux oldtimer:

• This machine is simply beautiful. Even the packaging was aesthetically pleasing.
• Setting up a WLAN connection turned out to be difficult; I simply couldn't make the Mac and my DLink base station to agree on a common WEP password. So I'm running a naked network now.
• iTunes (and especially the radio feature) is a very well designed piece of software, and I hope the Windows version is equally good.
• Built-in Bluetooth is a must.
• The display is unfortunately not a very good one; my Sharp Actius has a far better display.
• It is incredible how fast this machine wakes up from sleep.
• I like Debian, and thus Fink is simply the coolest thing since... well. The ability to say "apt-get install cvs" and trivially install software is a geeks daydream.
• The keyboard has keys in funny positions (where is the tilde?), and the touchpad is a tad too much to the right for my typing position: I tend to move my cursor randomly.
• Safari 1.0 is a very good web browser. I usually always use Mozilla Firebird, but I think I might just live with Safari for a while.
• Upgrading to OS 10.2.8 was the simplest OS upgrade ever. Way to go, Apple.

All in all, I'm liking it pretty much so far. I'll post some more impressions later on...

Update: OK, slightly more impressed now: I wanted to move from my WLAN connection to a local 100 Mbps Ethernet to copy all of my music on this computer. I plug the cable in and start to look for any kind of setting that would tell the Mac that it should be using now the Ethernet connection instead of the Airport. Can't find any with a quick look, so I decide to test it: and lo and behold, it automatically picked up the new connection, got a DHCP address and is now happily routing my LAN traffic through the faster wired network - without me ever telling it to!