Then yesterday, Apple released a firmware update that added SATA 3 Gbps support from the crippled SATA 1.5 Gbps it shipped with. After updating, my new Mac has been randomly freezing when reading from the hard drive. My guess is the problem is an incompatibility with the SATA 3 Gbps between the drive and controller. Some stories mentioned that the SATA 3 Gbps support was originally disabled because of intermittent data errors.

I posted in the Apple forums and it sounds like quite a few people who have upgraded the hard drive are having this problem. Unfortunately, there is no way to revert the firmware update. It might be possible to use the WD Data Lifeguard tools to disable SATA 3 Gbps support on the drive. Unfortunately, the tools only work on Windows or DOS CD or floppy. The other option is to switch back to the original drive.

Starcraft under Wine on Linux works pretty well. There are some issues with the display changing resolution that makes it hard to switch back to the desktop and resizes programs. There is a problem with some of the menus not clearing the screen which results in a jumble of text.

Starcraft under CrossOver Mac on the Mac works but not well. The CrossOver installer is nice; it makes managing installs easy. But Starcraft runs slowly. The mouse is jerky and unresponsive.

Starcraft under VMware Fusion running Windows 2000 on the Mac works pretty well. I used the free VMware Converter to turn the Windows 2000 partition on my old desktop into a VMware virtual machine. One of the nice things about VMware Fusion is that I can run the same virtual machine on Linux and Mac.

Another option for running it on Mac is to use the Mac version of Starcraft. The Mac version was originally made of Mac OS 9 and is PPC. Blizzard has a Mac OS X installer that allows it to run on Mac OS X. Supposedly, Rosetta is fast enough with running the PPC binary under Intel. Unfortunately, I have the Windows CD of Starcraft. It is possible one of my coworkers has the Mac version and I can use my CD key with that.

The Mac is very good at handling multiple displays. It detected the monitor when it was plugged in. It didn’t get the resolution correct but that was easy to change. The menu bar handling is annoying; one display is the primary one with the menu bar and dock. The other can just have windows where it is hard to use the menu. Also, some programs get confused about the resizing; it would be nice if windows recgonized that they were touching a side and stayed that way. If the menu bar was moved to the monitor, then the computer would stay active with the lid closed.

Somebody pointed me toward Synergy which allows sharing keyboard and mouse over the network. The machine that has the keyboard and mouse (in this case my work desktop) runs the server. Other machines run the client and connect to the server. Each machine has to have a text configuration file. Once it is working, it is smooth to move the mouse off the side of the screen and onto the other screen. The keyboard follows the mouse. Also, it connects the clipboards. It isn’t possible to drag windows between screens.

The only problem is that the key bindings are different between Mac and Linux. The Mac uses the Option key (mapped to Alt) where Linux uses Ctrl. The clipboard commands are especially confusing since Gnome Terminal is also different. I have gotten used to the different key bindings when switching between the laptop and desktop but it helps that the laptop keyboard is different.

The only problem is that iTunes does not support streaming Ogg files. The QuickTime Components do a good job of local Ogg playing but I guess iTunes does its own thing with streaming. It is supposed to be possible to setup transcoding so the server streams WAV instead.

UPDATE: Only development snapshots of mt-daapd support transcoding. And they support FLAC. But they don’t support Avahi and the patch does apply cleanly.

Unfortunately, the madwifi driver did not compile cleanly on the Fedora development kernel. First, the Fedora kernels are currently 2.6.18-rc4 but they are versioned as 2.6.17. There is code in the driver which detects 2.6.18 but that doesn’t work with the mislabelled version. Also, madwifi uses the config.h header which was replaced by autoconf.h but is finally deprecated in 2.6.18. I submitted a ticket with patch to get this fixed.

I wanted to install the kernel modules as RPMs instead of from source. livna.org has madwifi packages for FC5. With some patching, they are suitable for building with the kmod scheme. This involves building packages for each kernel release, variant, and architecture. I only build for the i686 standard variant. The command line looks like:

rpmbuild -ba --target=i686 --define "kversion 2.6.17-1.2586.fc6" --define 'kvariants ""' madwifi-kmod.spec

I have put the packages I built at my Fedora package directory. Installing the packages from the rpm command-line can be tricky because multiple versions are installed at once. Doing an upgrade will remove the version for an old kernel. Upgrading the module versions requires installing the new version for installed kernels and then removing the old versions. Yum is supposed to handle this.

Getting the wireless working once the module was installed was a snap. I used NetworkManager and it just worked. It detected the wireless network and switched to it when the Ethernet cable is removed. It prompts for the WPA password.

The install went smoothly. Fedora booted up without any problems. Lots of things just worked. The display was autodetected to the right size. The trackpad worked. The Fn key works as modifier. A few things didn’t work out of the box. The wireless card will require third-party drivers. The internal sound isn’t working. It sleeps but doesn’t resume. My Bluetooth Mighty Mouse works but only after restarting the hidd daemon.

First, I tried Fedora Core 5 DVD. The installer got to a spot where it recognized that the drive was partitioned with GPT and asked if it could reformat it. I have the suspicion that this would have invovled erasing the whole drive including Mac OS X. This bug in anaconda was fixed in rawhide so that anaconda fully handles GPT drives. My guess is that Windows doesn’t know anything about EFI or GPT and goes into a compability mode where it writes the MBR partition.

Next, I tried Fedora Rawhide. It had a bug where every key entered was duplicated. This made it impossible to use the installer. I found a bugzilla entry and did some searching and it seems to be a recent kernel bug. Hopefully, it wll be fixed soon and I can try again. I wasn’t able to use the FC5 boot CD kernel to load the rawhide installer.

Then, I tried Ubuntu. The LiveCD booted great. And the installer’s gparted understood the GPT partitions. But it didn’t have any way to create an LVM partition. After I rebooted, the MacBook won’t boot because it couldn’t find a bootable partition. Luckily, booting with Option held gave to the boot selection menu with the Macintosh HD and that allowed booting to Mac OS X. And the Startup Disk pane in System Preferences allowed changing the default boot disk back to Mac OS X.

I went searching for “itunes”, “track number”, and “ogg”. One of the pages I found looked familar. I had seen that color scheme before. I realized that it was my brother’s blog. The AppleScript he mentioned is currently working its way through my collection.

It works quite well with the Virtue Desktops desktop manager. Virtue has some cool animations when changing desktops, like flipping the screen, or rotating a cube. It is cool to flip over to a virtual Linux display.

There are a couple of problems. It doesn’t seem allow changing the VM definition while it is running which is a problem for changing devices, network configuration, or mounted CD images. VMware allows changing devices on the fly. Even the free VMware Player allows enabling devices, including USB ones. It also only supports bridged networking. This is a problem at work since the wireless access point only allows a single IP address per login and bridged networking gives the VM a separate IP address. VMware supports NAT networking.

Unfortunately, the really light ultraportable tend to be underpowered, expensive, or both. I really like the Samsung Q35 with Core Duo, but it is expensive (and not available in the US). The Gateway NX100X and Dell Latitude D420 both look nice and are not too expensive but are only Core Solo. The ThinkPad X60 is supposed to be great but is expensive.

I like the Apple MacBook. The keyboard is usable, the screen is good. The extras, like the camera, are nice. And it looks nice; the black one is really nice but the premium is too much. The low cost is also nice. The only problem could be the weight. It weighs 5 lbs, which is at least a half-pound heavier than the competitors. I am not sure if lugging that around will be a problem. I will likely install Linux, either dual-booting or using virtualization.

There are a few contenders at four pounds. The Lenovo 3000 V100 is heavier and cheaper than its ThinkPad cousin. Unfortunately, it only comes in two configurations either cheap and more limited, or expensive and more powerful than I wanted. The Dell XPS M1210 also sounds like a good compromise between power and cost. Dell and Lenovo also have 14″ models, the Latitiude D620 and ThinkPad T60 and Z60t.