Fedora Core 6 here I come

As I'm writing this my new DVD burner is.. ummmm... burning an ISO image of FC6. I'll install it at work tomorrow and write up a summary of all the bugs I encounter.

Linux fans... you better watch out coz Linux aint all that!

G4 no more!

I got rid of my Powermac G4 today. Sold it to some guy who will certainly appreciate it more than I do. I'm so happy to be back on my Intel Vista PC. Its so damn faster.

Now I can go to www.smh.com.au and scroll thru web pages with ease.

x86 CPUs are the best!!

A word of warning about Macs and Unix workstations

If you're a Windows sysadmin like me and have heard:

Macs are faster than PCs
RISC is faster than CISC
Unix is faster than Windows
Mac OS X is faster than Windows

let me give you this bit of warning before you waste money and time buying 2nd hand Macs and Unix workstations to play with:

Macs and Unix (as long as they are NOT on Intel hardware) is not as fast as Windows.

I've used Sun Ultra Sparc 5's, and Blades 100 and 150. These machines cannot do 1280x1024x32 so using them on your 19inch LCD is a no-no unless you're happy to go with a lower resolution or colour-depth. Secondly their video performance is dreadful. A great set of real world tests is to use Firefox to visit the following websites:

* smh.com.au
* hsv.com.au
* trailers.apple.com

Don't just visit the above sites. Scroll thru the pages, load up links with tab browsing and view video clips and PDF files.

The Apple PowerMac G4s can do 1280x1024x32 easily. Problem is, all of them suck when it comes to scrolling thru complex web pages like smh.com.au and PDF files. Similarly, emails with graphics imbedded take a long time to display compared to text only emails.

If you're going to get a Mac or Unix workstation to familiarise yourself with the Operating System Environment do yourself a favour and make sure it comes with an Intel or x86 chip.

MP3 players and idiots

I was driving at the front of the queue in my lane and approaching a red light. On my right the cars in that lane had already stopped. Two car lengths from my intended stop this idiot walks straight across my lane from the rear of the first car in the right lane. He was looking down at the ground, ear phones plugged in and MP3 player in hand.

If the timing had been "right" and the lights had turned green upon my approach, who knows what might have happen.

Sleeping with Mac OS X 10.4

One really positive great feature of OS 10.4 Tiger is the 'Sleep' function. Any time I want to leave the computer for an extended period of time all I have to do is click the Apple Menu and choose 'Sleep'. Within moments everything is quiet and my G4 emits a pulsating white light thru the power button. I have told the Mac to sleep and awaken many times over the last week and it hasn't failed me yet so I am thoroughly impressed and satisfied in that regard - not a single reboot!

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is a CPU hog

My 800Mhz G4 PowerMac (which Apple fans claim is the equivalent of a 1600Mhz Pentium 4) is running extra slow. It was already slow enough as it is. The hard disk was formatted and Tiger installed only a week ago. The apps I have running now are: Safari 2, FireFox 2, Terminal, and of course the Finder. I've only got a dozen tabs open in my browsers but 'top' is telling me my CPU is constantly being used. The idle time is consistently less than 50% - in other words, the CPU usage is constantly above 50% so everything is slow and LAGGY as hell even though I have 1GB of memory in here.

Suse Linux 10.1 aftermath

Well its been over 3 weeks since I installed Suse 10.1 on my 2nd production workstation at the office. I've been busy with other sysadmin tasks and haven't touched it in a while. Recently I used it and discovered the following:

Evolution is broken!! It just stopped working. Period. I tried a reboot but that didn't work! To even begin to compare it to Outlook is a joke. There is no way to resend emails, for example, if you have a daily need to send the same (or almost identical) email every day.

CUPS is broken. The Linux box just won't print. Deleting the printer and adding it back did not work at all. Contrast this to my production WinXP Pro box which gets hammered every day... and printing works ALL the time!

I've had enough of Suse 10.1. I would have thought a company like Novell would have done a better job, but NO!! Linux still sucks... BIG TIME!!