MacBook Pro ~ Jan 14, 2009
As I tweeted yesterday, I received my new MacBook Pro. I was a bit skeptical on choosing this computer being a Linux user/developer for quite some time now. I thought it was worth giving it a try anyway. Besides, I still use my old Powerbook; as my home server since I've always liked the Mac hardware.
For the time being, I'm not running Debian in it, but I will install it sooner or later, for now, I've reached some stability and productivity on the current setup, I'm running MacPorts, which brings all the nice open source goodies to Leopard, Vimperator, TwitVim and all sort of terminal scripts to make Terminal.app more delightful to work with. We'll see how it goes.
Hard obstacles that I've found so far that were a pain to deal with:
- More than one Ruby and RubyGems installation (the base system, and the MacPorts installation).
- MySQL on MacOS (specially hard if you are trying to make all work from MacPorts).
- Getting used to "Spaces". I like one row with up to eight or ten columns. Apparently, you can only have up to four column spaces.
- GNOME-Terminal vs Terminal.app.
- CA certificates to make Mutt (or fetchmail) work properly with SSL (post to come).
- MacOS' postfix.
All of this is obviously workaroundable, but being a Linux dork it sometimes takes more time 
ok, in english then…
I've purchased a new Mac Book pro and i like it a lot, i use darwinports and as you say some stuff is tricky to get it to work but since it's unix it will work eventually.
I've installed ubuntu on it and almost everything works after the installation except for the sound wich i'm solving by installing the newest version of alsa and the restricted propietary stuff like flash. I haven't installed the eye candy stuff but i expect it to look better than mac os x once i finished tuning it up
(and yes gnome-terminal is better than Terminal.app)
imcsk8
14 Jan 09 at 1:05 pm
Maybe some of the information on my site at diymacserver.com might be of help to you using MySQL and Postfix. Congrats on the MacBook Pro…
Richard
15 Jan 09 at 5:26 am
@imcsk8: Thanks for your comments! Indeed, at least if it works nicely for Ubuntu, it should definitively work for Debian too with some tweaks.
admin
15 Jan 09 at 9:44 am
@Richard: Thanks for letting me know. I will take a look at it.
admin
15 Jan 09 at 9:45 am
Hola David, te comento que que yo compré una Macbook de Aluminio y tiene muy mal soporte con Debian, para poder hacerla funcionar como era (la luz del teclado, Wireless, etc) me tocó instalarle a mano el 2.6.28. Lo mismo me sucedió con el driver de Nvidia. La bateria solo dura 2 horas y calienta burda.
Son muy buenos hierros, lastima que en este momento Debian no tenga buen soporte para ella.
Un abrazo,
apostols
16 Jan 09 at 2:05 pm
@apostols:
I don't care too much if vanilla Debian is not ready for a MacBook. The sad thing about it is that Debian has proven to care more about its mental jackoffs on stupidity and so-called free software than on real life users. Debian has lost the vision on providing users with the greatest operating system it used to be.
That said, I don't expect Debian to run out of the box. I expect the MacBook to run Debian and me, the one making all changes needed. I'm not scared on building my own kernel because I've done that for long enough now. I don't mind building the NVIDIA drivers myself because I think that's the way to go to have a reliable system, instead of letting someone else doing it for you with no prior knowledge on how your system is configured.
I will be satisfied if all hardware actually works, no matter if you have to deal with it yourself. I didn't mean that in the very first place.
Thanks for commenting.
David Moreno
17 Jan 09 at 2:24 pm