Re: [ALUG] Anybody else ever tried fast-user-switching as context-switching?
On 20 Jun 2007, at 13:53, Richard Bensley wrote:
I have been a bit busy, so I am just scanning the list, but yes you would find a lot better help in general with Linux guys and gals, and since OSX is UNIX, you will find many including myself are mac users. Yes! I feel so validated!
I was surprised to find out MUGs even existed! My immediate reaction had been "I am now on the Mac platform, I need to find out where the Mac users are". But I kept falling over the advocacy-zealotry and the fact that everybody within 60 miles or so of me seemed to be Mac-ghetto rather than my (admittedly-untypical) switch pattern of "20 years Windows followed by crash-and-burn Linux switch-unswitch, followed by more Windows, followed by: what I actually want is Gorgeous Consumer Stuff and consistent UI to feed the dumb user and Unix to feed the beginner geekery. I shall get a Mac"
I hasten to add that I did not crash-and-burn on Linux because I think it's invariably a Worse Operating System for Everyone than the others, but because I switched too early and far too fast with no advice or local support, and unswitched. Am currently giving advice on LJ to a Mac user thinking of Linux dual-boot that she will almost certainly find it an unrewarding experience because dual-boot works for almost nobody (I'm fairly sure that this is likely to be the case for Macintel as well, but have no actual data as my box is G4), and that she'd have far more luck buying a cheap secondhand laptop for Linux 'play' and 'switching sideways' so that she can retreat to the user-comfort-zone between fits of geek-fu.
Our meetings are the second Thursday of every month int he Reindeer Pub (dereham road) in norwich, but there is also an Ipswich group which meet every 3rd Monday I think?!? But of course you and Adrian would be most welcome, conversations and topics (as you have proven) are vast! Went to the Ips group this week, and noticed that even though I couldn't get any help with the problem I _thought_ I was going for, the group is a far better fit for me personally than ghetto-Mac. May consider coming to the Norwich group for social reasons if I haven't frightened you off yet :-)
Regards, Ruth
On 20/06/07, Ruth Bygrave <rbygrave@ntlworld.com> wrote:
My immediate reaction had been "I am now on the Mac platform, I need to find out where the Mac users are". But I kept falling over the advocacy-zealotry and the fact that everybody within 60 miles or so of me seemed to be Mac-ghetto rather than my (admittedly-untypical) switch pattern of "20 years Windows followed by crash-and-burn Linux switch-unswitch, followed by more Windows, followed by: what I actually want is Gorgeous Consumer Stuff and consistent UI to feed the dumb user and Unix to feed the beginner geekery. I shall get a Mac"
I was convinced that Macs were for me when I was dealing with a now former producer at the place where I work. She asked me to help get some data off her PowerBook as the machine needed repair and I found that the UNIX-side to the Mac was pretty good. It could do X, could compile stuff with very little effort and had a very pleasant user interface. Since then I've been around Macs a lot at work and at home, and at all other times I use Linux workstations. I barely touch Windows these days except on the very odd occasion when particular applications demand it. And with the advent of VMware Fusion on the Mac (Intel stuff only), I can now run Windows, Linux and Solaris alongside OS X all at the same time (resources permitting). Regards, Martyn -- Email : martyn@drake.org.uk Phone : +44 (0)7866 450 752 Fax : +44 (0)2070 221 564 Blog : http://www.drake.org.uk
Am currently giving advice on LJ to a Mac user thinking of Linux dual-boot that she I really am looking in the wrong places for like minded girls!
unrewarding experience because dual-boot works for almost nobody Also pretty unstable via tools like bootcamp which, although I only booted into windows once, quickly caused an "invalid symlink" on my drive in my iMac. PANIC>PANIC>BACKUP>REINSTALL
May consider coming to the Norwich group for social reasons There's other reasons?!?
if I haven't frightened you off yet :-) Myself and a few others generally get a bit tipsy, I doubt you could phase us ;)
Rich
In the long rambling blog-entry this idea about Never Dual Boot is clipped from, I said, "If Parallels works as a solid fast emulation layer that lets people 'flip' back and forth between programs in the same desktop, this will have more effect on the drawing-OSs-together thing than dual-boot ever could." Regards, Ruth (...who is lazy and boots her box as seldom as possible)
On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 15:47 +0100, Richard Bensley wrote:
unrewarding experience because dual-boot works for almost nobody Also pretty unstable via tools like bootcamp which, although I only booted into windows once, quickly caused an "invalid symlink" on my drive in my iMac. PANIC>PANIC>BACKUP>REINSTALL
Oh that, I had that well before bootcamp came out. Seen it a few times now, I think it can randomly happen after OSX has checked it's disk and tried to repair something. A re-installation is the long winded way of fixing it though. You can generally just boot into single user mode, find the offending simlink (which it normally reports as it boots in single user mode) and delete it and recreate pointing to the right place. Of course finding the "right place" on OSX can be "fun" sometimes. Although think the first time I fixed it on a machine was about the second time I had touched OSX so it couldn't have been that difficult :-)
On 20-Jun-07 13:36:11, Ruth Bygrave wrote:
[...] Am currently giving advice on LJ to a Mac user thinking of Linux dual-boot that she will almost certainly find it an unrewarding experience because dual-boot works for almost nobody (I'm fairly sure that this is likely to be the case for Macintel as well, but have no actual data as my box is G4), and that she'd have far more luck buying a cheap secondhand laptop for Linux 'play' and 'switching sideways' so that she can retreat to the user-comfort-zone between fits of geek-fu.
That looks like a very good idea. While I don't know from direct experience, I should imagine that OS X's networking (being BSD based) is very compatible with Linux's, so she (and you ... ) could have a Linux box (which for many purposes can be cheap near-junk hardware) cabled to a Mac box, and be able to log in to either from the other. Then you get the best of both worlds. The one question I know nothing about is the relationship between the Mac GUI and the Linux GUI (by which I mean X Windows, regardless of which window manager, such as GNOME/KDE, gets involved). On two or more networked Linux boxes, provided all have X-capable applications installed and the one you're sitting at is actually running X, you can run any application on any box you're logged into, and have its display appear on your own screen as if you were sitting at the machine it's really running on. I don't know at all whether the Mac's windows can be displayed in this way on a networked Linux box. It would be great if it was possible. There have been solutions (sort of) to getting this to happen with Windows boxes cabled to Linux boxes (a sort of X emulation for Windows), so I should think that (a) it's possible on a Mac; (b) Apple have thought of it. But, if the ghetto is as closed as you suggest, Apple may not be encouraging it to happen! My Mac-fan friend the other day emailed me to the effect that "this is the future!", following the anouncement of the forthcoming release of Leopard. The main thing that struck me was the "Spaces" feature which, as has already been pointed out, has been a feature of Linux since a very long time ago. (I pointed this out to him too, and I hope I haven't offended or upset him). Perhaps when you come to the meets (especially the occasional kit-meets) people will happily demonstrate the flexibility and "fast user switching" that this enables.
Our meetings are the second Thursday of every month in the Reindeer Pub(dereham road) in norwich, but there is also an Ipswich group which meet every 3rd Monday I think?!? But of course you and Adrian would be most welcome, conversations and topics (as you have proven) are vast! Went to the Ips group this week, and noticed that even though I couldn't get any help with the problem I _thought_ I was going for, the group is a far better fit for me personally than ghetto-Mac. May consider coming to the Norwich group for social reasons if I haven't frightened you off yet :-)
No, you haven't. Indeed, I get the impression that people are queuing up to get you straight on Linux! Ipswich or Norwich, I'm sure you'll be very welcome. Best wishes, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 20-Jun-07 Time: 16:36:01 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 (Ted Harding) wrote:
The one question I know nothing about is the relationship between the Mac GUI and the Linux GUI (by which I mean X Windows, regardless of which window manager, such as GNOME/KDE, gets involved).
On two or more networked Linux boxes, provided all have X-capable applications installed and the one you're sitting at is actually running X, you can run any application on any box you're logged into, and have its display appear on your own screen as if you were sitting at the machine it's really running on.
I don't know at all whether the Mac's windows can be displayed in this way on a networked Linux box.
It would be great if it was possible. There have been solutions (sort of) to getting this to happen with Windows boxes cabled to Linux boxes (a sort of X emulation for Windows), so I should think that (a) it's possible on a Mac; (b) Apple have thought of it. But, if the ghetto is as closed as you suggest, Apple may not be encouraging it to happen!
Mac OS X's native window manager, Quartz, is completely independent of X11 and thus, AFAIK, you can't remote native OS X apps on a Linux box. However, OS X Tiger ships with a OS X version of X11, and you can, if you feel like it, run KDE or Gnome as the OS X window manager. Even without that drastic step you can still run Mac-installed X11-based apps easily enough (I run xterm, OpenOffice and The Gimp on my MacBook Pro, for example), and thus remote-run them from an external Linux box. If you're interested in this sort of stuff, then I'd recommend the O'Reilly book "Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks" - it's a great source of info on subverting OS X to run more like Linux/Unix, especially when it comes to significant differences like the startup process (no init.d/rc.d), no real useradd and the alternative package managers Fink and DarwinPorts. Hth, Simon ================================================================= http://nosher.net -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFGeVLJ8tdcY+OcZZwRAs0rAKCZCwJd2WFnsGP5WFDu4Y1NaQO0HQCggaOg /Nr9FSCSMd8qOgCuteazbO0= =F8fa -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
comes to significant differences like the startup process (no init.d/rc.d), no real useradd and the alternative package managers Fink and DarwinPorts.
Personally, I had Not Much Luck with the open source stuff I've downloaded for Mac. The readme told me which directory to put it in, so I did. I tried to get fink to do something. I checked the readme and had got the path correct. The program (tiny little freeware thing) errored at me, told me I had got the path wrong, and just sat there looking blank. I had a similar problem with another program I tried. (this is so long ago I forget which) Almost certainly, you lot would have known what Wisdom to Perform when the default in the readme file didn't work. Unfortunately, I was fresh out of dead chickens, and ran away. Regards, R PS. Any actually coherent and sensible reason the reply-to seems to go to 'individual user' rather than 'chatty mailing list'? I never understand that...
On Wed, Jun 20, 2007 at 08:03:10PM +0100, Ruth Bygrave wrote:
PS. Any actually coherent and sensible reason the reply-to seems to go to 'individual user' rather than 'chatty mailing list'? I never understand that...
Mostly because well behaved mail clients know about the List-* headers, with mutt and this list (and 99% of other lists I'm on), to reply to the individual I can just hit "r", to reply to the list I can hit "L". Much nicer. Also, it means that we're not mangling the From header, and we're not overriding the users "Reply-To" header. Thanks, -- Brett Parker
PS. Any actually coherent and sensible reason the reply-to seems to go to 'individual user' rather than 'chatty mailing list'? I never understand that...
Ruth, If you're using Mac Mail, try hitting reply all which will give you both the list email and the personal email so you can delete the one you don't want to reply to. It's a bit of a fudge, but it works... Thanks, Dave -- David Reynolds david@reynoldsfamily.org.uk
participants (8)
-
Brett Parker -
David Reynolds -
Martyn Drake -
Richard Bensley -
Ruth Bygrave -
Simon Ransome -
ted.harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk -
Wayne Stallwood