As I have mentioned earlier in this blog, I have recently obtained a brand new and shiny Apple PowerMac G5. Some of you may wonder what the status might in that dept.
First of all, I have to recap some of the context. I am, and will probably always be, a linux kind of guy. And not only that. I also prefer a working environment which is as simple and clean as possible. I do not work in the console, but not far away - I use the fvwm windowmanager, without panel, pagers, icons on desktop, menus and so on - just windows with as litle decoration as possible. And everything I need to start often bound to clever keys. I also move between windows using a Vi-like set of keybindings. The mouse is something I use at little as possible, mostly to click on links in the browser window.
So, what is the deal with the Mac then? First of all, the hardware is quite cool, so I like to check it out. Besides that, I needed a desktop computer at home, and as it is almost impossible to buy a computer with linux on, why not buy something which come close? Finally, I like to play music, like saxophone and clarinet, as well as piano and guitar. I have heard that the Mac should be quite good at recording and stuff, so I want to try that out as well. To summarize we can say that I want to
- make a working-environment as close to my linux environment as possible on the Mac
- check out how the Mac work as a home musical production system
First, lets have a look on aplications. The most important issue in order to
get a sucessful working environment will be that the applications you relay on
are available. As I tend to rely more or less only on opensource software, I
am lucky. In most cases you can just grab the source and do the regular
configure, make, make install sequence to get what you need on Mac. The reason
of course is the unix under the hood on the Mac OSX. You have to remark though
that stuff you install this way tend to run under X11, not under the to Mac
native gui environment, Aqua. There are some subtile differences although X11
is undoubtly very well integrated.
Fortunately, fine folks around the globe have put efort into porting some main
applications to the Aqua environment. This mean that I can run firefox,
thunderbird, Abiword, vim and a few more appications direclty in Aqua, even
without compiling as all these are available in precompiled versions. Add to
that the darwinports and fink projects, which both make several important
packages available either as precompiled software or easy to build packages,
and I hvae everything I want, including state-of-the-art perl and python
environments, latex publishing tools, the graphics manipulation programmm
gimp, the spreadsheet gnumeric and openoffice - most of these running under
X11 though.
Anything else we need to add? If you need or like to have, gui interfaces to
both cvs and subversion are available in Aqua, as well as in
terminal/commandline versions. Needless to say, the die-hard linux nerd as my
self have almost everything available on the mac, and whats not there is quite
easy to build usually.
To good to be true, you may say - there must be something? Yes, there are, but
we're really into the details here. I still miss the evolution mail/calendar
suite. Probably it will be possible to compile this one as well, but since it
is a really large build with a lot of dependencies, I haven't got around to
that yet.
After that, lets move into some really gory details. As a big-number of years
**ix user, ypu have probably grew accustomed to your own very special Xmodmap,
as well as keybindings related to the keyboard map in your windowmanager. I
for instance switch esc and caps-lock as I am a vi-kind of guy. Then I map
Alt-{h,j,k,l} to switching focus between windows in the natural directions.
Alt or Alt-ctrl or Alt-shift coupled with some letter start a specific
applications, one which feel very natural to me because the binding have been
ther for years. Even window movement, resizing or maximize/minimize may be
performed this way, reducing the mouse to a very litle used device.
Some of this you can do on Mac, but certainly not all. The Apple/Mac
philosopy is that there should preferably be just one way to do some task,
and that should be the way Apple think is right, not the way you like it.
What they achive is consistency between applications, but at the cost of
flexibility for the user. Some aspect of this is as I said possible to
tackle, but not as easy as you may be used to. And something can't be done at
all.
What annoyes me most? To this date, I have not been able to remap Esc to the
Caps-lock key. I really can't do without that mapping. Most of the other stuff
I can handle, but for that one I might have to rewire the keyboard or buy
another keyboard with the Esc key in the right position.
What about music production then. I just have to say that it works quite well
in that dept., though I have to relay on software that cost me money, like
Logic express. But that is ok, as music equipment like saxophone or keyboard,
or equipment like decesnt microphone and soundcard, costs money too...
