Hi guys,

4 days ago, I’ve posted about the pain of selecting the right OS. I would love to write: “I’ve found it! XYZ is the perfect match for me!”, but this does not happen (yet). And believe me: I don’t make it easy for myself.

I leaned back for an hour or so and thought about the local infrastructure here. Thinking about 3 screaming servers in the basement, a screaming loud Linksys GBit 19″ switch and a powerful PC at the attic. Hmm…

To be honest, after thinking for a time, I ask myself for what I will need it, I thought about energy costs and virtualization aspects of the new Q9650 CPU in my workstation. The servers are running at a very low CPU and RAM usage (sure, Linux uses around 100% of the RAM, but just because it’s there). Hmm… 2 wasting servers and an IPCop. Do you get what I was thinking about? Right! The workstation could handle some VMs while running, this would save me around 160 Watts. Calculate this over a month, a year – win/win – without loosing the comfort of different servers.

Good point – in my mind and the first step into the right direction. (Some of you may think: What!? He has so great hardware and think about not using it?! – Yep! But good to have a backup, right?).

Turning to the workstation, here’s what I did in the last few days on my PC.

First of all, I’ve removed the RAID from my server HADRON and put it back to the PC. Initially I’d bought the RAID for the workstation. I wanted to run Vista, having 2 graphic cards in the PC aswell. A PC that could be created by Stefan Didak

The truth is, I have a different scope of (private) work I’m doing here at home. Work is done on a single ThinkPad using Windows XP.

But back to the last 4 days. Now, that I’ve set up Windows Vista on the 6TB RAID, which is nice fast and secure, I’m trying to get back to Windows day by day. It’s pretty hard, if you’ve used OS X for the last few years mainly for private work. I don’t count the business stuff, because I work with special tools there and I know how to handle it, so XP works for me there.

Over the weekend, I’ve done some work on a PHP/MySQL web-app, I’m currently writing. Guess what I’ve used for this. You got it: My MacBook. Not that I couldn’t use Intype in Windows instead of TextMate on OS X and WinSCP on Windows instead of Transmit on OS X… Well, on one hand, I’ve worked for hours on Sunday in the bed. The last day of the 1 week vacation and we watched some TV series while I was working on the web-app. Right now, I’m writing this post on my MacBook, which lies in front of my PC keyboard and in front of the 2 displays.

Hmm…

Damn – if I would find a way to use the RAIDset as bootable volume for a Hackintosh based system, I think I would vote for this. But I think that’s not possible

Turning to the other site: before I’ve installed the RAIDset, I tried installing Debian, getting the graphic card to work was a challenge, but there’s Google, so I found a nice tutorial or call it HowTo. When I got this to work and also had the WindowMaker running in German instead of US, I wanted to play a video at the freshly installed VLC. No sound. Oh dear! Installing and configuring for hours and I have no sound. Of course – I had installed it from scratch and not “Desktop” in the installation setup – me fool.

To make long things short: I’d wasted 5h’s and was a little bit frustrated, so I’d inserted the Ubuntu 9.04 64bit CD that was laying on my desk and installed this instead. Hmm.. nice, but… even with the running sound, I found some bugs usung Xinerama and 2 diplays (the cursor stays at the left screen when I moved it to the left one for example, and does not fade away). I played around with Ubuntu for some more minutes or maybe 2 hours. It simply does not fit to me – as a desktop. It doesn’t worked for me really in the past and it will not work for me in the future.

Isn’t this great? I’ve removed Linux from my “possible desktop”-list.

Now there are just two systems left:
- Mac OS X as a Hackintosh installation
- Windows Vista 64bit

Not easy to choose, I see pros in both parts, but I really don’t want to have a Dual-Setup. Why not? Well, I would more switch from System to System than doing something productive. Currently, I do a enough unproductive

That’s the current status. Can’t await your comments

Ciao
Dennis

[Update]
Hi, just found this interesting YouTube video from Chris Pirillo I would like to show you, so I grabbed it and… well – here it is Have fun!

Tweet This Post Digg This Facebook Reddit

Hi guys,

while crossing through different systems (if you click a bit through my blog, you get an idea ), I thought it was a nice idea to put my mostly used software together for each area and OS in a table with links to the project sites.

Here we go…

Comment: Regarding Office @ Linux/UNIX: I never used a spreadsheet-tool on Linux/UNIX yet, but for word-processing, I’m very satisfied with Abiword.

Ciao
Dennis

Tweet This Post Digg This Facebook Reddit

Hi guys,

normally I wouldn’t write a post on my blog for a thing like a new chair, but this one is special.

This is the HermanMiller Mirra chair. Stunning design, awesome comfort and very good for my plagued back.

Since 2002, I’m using an IKEA chair, which is meanwhile way too crappy to call it a comfortable chair. The leather is ripped for a few years now in the middle of the seat, rotating the seat on the stand feels like it will break down in it’s parts pretty soon. Time for a new one.

Believe me, I haven’t made this decision easy. So, we (my wife and I) went to a showroom in Krefeld-Gartenstadt by HMErgonomics, a NL/DE company, based in Venlo (NL) and Straelen (DE). Both places are around the corner. The showroom is a great one! I was really surprised of the service we received there. The nice guy had 1 1/2 hours time for us to select the best fitting chair from the HermanMiller collection. I sat on 5 or 6 different chairs, but the one I saw on the web and loved it for the colors combinations (the Mirra), was the most comfortable. With the lumbar support, 3D arm supports and a lot different settings and fancy lemon/light grey color combination, it’s THE chair for me.

Honestly, because of the high price here in Germany (with discount, amazingly 1020 Euro), I needed some weeks to be sure that I really want it. I checked the web, we visited other stores for other chairs and I sat on a lot different ones – finally my decision was made: The Mirra!

Well, now I’m excited – and have to wait some time. The chair will be manufactured for me in the USA and then shipped to Europe. The estimated delivery date is week 29, so I think it will be here on July 17th.

Not a cheap choice, I know, but with 12 YEARS of warranty, I’m pretty sure to be save of getting a new chair every few years.

Ciao
Dennis

Tweet This Post Digg This Facebook Reddit

Hey guys,

this is a post about my thoughts about different Operating Systems and the issue that I have while trying to select MY OS for myself.

Back in the 80ies when I grow up, I had my Schneider CPC464 with a funny green CRT. I learned a bit about Basic on this little machine and of course, also played cool games like Boulder Dash those days.

After 2 years, I got a Commodore C64 for christmas with a fancy color display. I couldn’t believe it! Computers where monochrome for me those days. My Dad had a IBM-XT PC and I remember that I loved to see how AutoCAD built the Columbia. Simply loading and displaying it took about one hour. Funny days. Of course, my Dad also had a monochrome screen, which was enough for dBase, Text4 and a bit of AutoCAD.

Around 3 years later, I wanted more power (oh dear, that is the point in my life where it all begun), so I sold my C64 and took some money that I got from my birthday and had to decide: get an Amiga 500 to play with or buy this crappy, but geeky 80286-AT with 8MHz and whopping 2MB of RAM and a fany 20MB MFM harddisk. The Amiga could be connected to a TV, what means color. The PC had a orange (Bernstein) color CRT. Honestly, I don’t know why, but I had the feeling, that the PC is the better choice. Ha! I remember that the 3.5″ floppy didn’t worked with 1.44MB diskettes and my Dad and I didn’t understand why. A few years later someone told me, that some 286/AT PCs where not able to allocate more than “DD” (720KByte) to the BUS, so I stuck with the DD diskettes, what was not a big issue. I installed DOS 5.0 on it and had fun playing around with QBasic which was delivered with the OS. Later, I started to use Windows 3.0 on it. Crappy software, but it worked. I had more fun on the console.

The next big thing was an upgrade to the 80386-DX/33 that a friend of my parents sold me. I got 4MB of RAM for it and took the ISA MFM cards from the previous PC with me. For christmas I got an upgrade to 8MB of RAM. Damn expensive! The system of the choice was meanwhile MS-DOS 6.2 and still Windows 3.11, which I rarely used. It was so much more fun to edit the config.sys and autoexec.bat to get the last KByte/s of the memory below 640KByte/s. This was needed to play a lot games. It was before strange tools like MemMaker or Quemm386

With upgrading to my 80486-DX/33, I started to use Windows more and more. When I upgraded the CPU and kicked out the Intel CPU and installed my first CPU on my own (a AMD-468/DX4/100), Windows 95 came out and I bought it. It was really painful to spend 200 DM on this, even if it was “just” an upgrade from my previous Win 3.11).

*STOP*

This was the point where I should look around and seek out for other systems. Linux was already born those days, but at those times, just a handfull people in my city had access to data networks via modem and mailboxes. I had none and all friends just knew Windows and heared of Mac’s.

*GOING ON WITH THE STORY*

The AMD CPU was sooo cool and I was very proud of it, my friends where amazed by the speed of Command and Conquer on my computer. Oh yeah – I had a 14″ color CRT that time.

From 1995, everything went faster. Much much faster. While I was happy with my 386 and 486 for a couple of years, I didn’t had the AMD CPU for a long time, because I spend ALL of the money that I had collected for a Pentium 100MHz CPU. WOW! Whopping fast and amazing CPU. Of course, I had to buy a new mainboard for this.

I remember that I went through a AMD K6-200MHz and a Intel Celeron 300A which was clocked at 450MHz. This was the most reliable machine I ever had. It worked until 2 years ago! Pretty cool, ha?

Windows 95 was replaced by Windows 98 SE and games became heavier. A nVidia RIVA-TNT AGP card with 16MByte or RAM was the fastet card in the clique. A friend and I bought the same system in the same store, 100% the same 128MB RAM. Wohoo! But you know what? I want make the thing a bit shorter.

In my education I worked a lot on Apple Macintosh systems. G3/266MHz Performa series and later on, on G4 Dual Core 400MHz machines. At home I worked on Windows 2000. I had a job at a company in Düsseldorf for 1/2 year until I wanted to start my studies at the University of Dortmund (IT). While moving to the new apartment, I a killed building savings contract. Wow! So much money! I spend about 2500 DM on my very first own Mac. An iBook G3 with 12.1″. But I was not really satisfied with the iBook and sold it a few months later. I had my PC all the time to do 3D graphics with my bougth Student version of Maxon’s Cinema 4D, so I worked on this a lot. At the end of the year (2001), I wanted a Mac again, but not a mobile one, so I collected money and bought a QuickSilver G4/733MHz Apple PowerMac and I was satisfied – for a few months. I went back to Moers, because the education at the University was not the right thing for me and started working for Medion. A PC manufactor here in Germany who sells the PCs at the ALDI stores, maybe you’ve heared of them. So – there I was, with a brandnew job at the callcenter, some experience in the mind of how to use the Windows XP, that was the state of art for a few months now, but without the chance of testing anything at home, because the PPC just allowed me to run Mac OS X . No free selection like today – Windows on Macs? Yes, there where some expensive and superslow tools available. So I sold the Mac and the iBook that I got meanwhile (some people do funny things, ha?) and got a Pentium 4 / 2GHz – equipped with Windows XP. I was not really satisfied in the beginning with Windows XP and because of that, I also played around a lot with Linux. I ran RedHat 8, 9 and Fedore Core 2. Debian was nice, but I used that more on the SparcStations that I got for a few bucks by eBay. I had my new apartment and so I collected computers. Yeah, call me a nerd, a geek – I am I had different Suns, 2 SGIs (Indigo & O2) and a lot of different PCs over the years. Also Macs where a “I want to have” products, just to count a few: G5 (2x), iBooks, PowerBooks and yes, also Mac Pro as you can read here.

Today, I’m running a MacBook Unibody 13″ and I’m very satisfied with it. I sold the MacPro a few months ago and since that, I’m hunting for a system for me which really satisfies me. Maybe you’ve seen that I ran Hackintosh for a while. It was more or less great. Because the system was simply not made for this hardware, I run into hardware issues and crazy constructions to fix them again and again. In the end, I finally gave up. OS X is great – on Macs. I must admit, that I spend a lot time on this and it was maybe a waste of time.

The issue that I ran into is, that I’m not satisfied with ANY OS nowadays. Let me give you a brief overview on 5 systems that I’d used in the past.

MAC OS X
I love it – on my MacBook. It’s perfect if you do exactly what you should do. Do presentations in Keynote, write things in Pages, browse using Safari or maybe also Firefox (since 3.x it’s really nice on OS X, too). If I want to collect my photos, I use iPhoto. I never understood Aperture, but that is a really different thing.

OS X is great if you simply want to do your stuff. But I am a person that wants more. Having my Mac Pro under the desk, I wanted a RAID5 where I could boot from. Sure, there’s a card for around 800 US$ + harddrives + a horrible expensive “Bootcamp”-cable. No way! Too expensive. One of the reasons why I sold it – I was simply pissed, even if it was an awesome computer! (And yeah, maybe it was a fault to sell it).

What annoys me most on OS X is described in an older post of me.

But isn’t it funny? I spend a lot money on this PC I type on now, bought 6 harddiscs, an expensive hardware-RAID-controller by Areca and two graphic cards, new mainboard, CPU, a lot of RAM and a handful deluxe Noktua fans for this beast – and what did I do after some days of disappointment with Vista? Installing OS X. Bam! Here we are now.

Currently, I’m installing different systems again and again with the hope to find a fitting one for me.

The issue is, that I was more or less satisfied with OS X. Hackintosh runs more or less stable, but not good enough for a complete and main system (in my eyes) – so OS X was out. Oh! How often did I said that? :/ – very often – and a day later, the Hackintosh was installed again.

So, what annoys me on Vista?

VISTA
Vista, I get sick when I see Aero. What a clumbsy design is that. It looks awful and I hate it from the deepest of my sould . Everything is somewhere else and the PC reacts too often for my taste and tells me what to do. It’s slow even on this beast of a computer. Sure, here I have my tools like Photoshop, MS Office and Intype which is a great replacement for TextMate on Windows, but it feels wrong. Today, I’ve installed it again and what should I say? I didn’t get the configuration done before I had these “this is not your system”-feeling. I was satisfied with XP in the end. I hate Lune, too. Royal Blue theme was pretty cool and I also used to work with the Classic mode. Not beautyful, but worked for me. In Vista, sure – I can turn of Aero and also join the Classic Mode, but c’mon – it’s 2009 and I still should use a “theme” from 1995?! No.

LINUX
Well, lovely, free and great Linux. I love Linux – on my servers. My webserver here is running for nearly 2 years now without any issues, based on Ubuntu server 6.06.2. Very nice! But on my desk… As mentioned before, I had Fedora Core 2 running for a while (like 6 months). I had the time to really get into. I understood how and WHY to have to mount my cameras card by hand. Even my scanner worked (the same which don’t work today on Vista nor OS X ). I was solo that time. Today, I’ve a wife, I’ve a house and a job that don’t know shift ends, so I have less time.

Linux is in my mind a system with future. Also on the desktop! Not for me – yet, but when I see movies like StartUp (AntiTrust), which is my absolute favourite movie, I fell in love with the design of Synapse (which is GNome v1). It looks so cool, clean and maybe geek enough for my desires . 2-3 years ago, I used Ubuntu a lot, but it had some issues with my hardware and the fact, that it don’t run Photoshop (please, don’t comment here that I should use Gimp instead, I’m using Photoshop since 1996 and I don’t feel like I should switch to Gimp), makes it worse for me.

Today, there’s a MacBook laying here on my desk (currently sleeping ) so there’s all I need to work on, right? But I bought this PC that is now under my desk. The RAID5 is now in the server in the rack in the basement of our house, but the PC remains here. 2x 22″ displays sitting on this desktop (I’ve just added a 2nd desk to my part of the desk to seperate work & private a bit – I really need to make some current photos and share with you guys), which was simply too expensive to let it stay under the desk and get dusty. Selling it also on eBay? No. Not really.

UNIX
I also used FreeBSD at the beginning of this year (remember?) to start into ZFS and Software RAID. I removed it when I got my hardware RAID card. I like FreeBSD; it’s nice, very fast but has one painpoint: Hardware compatibity. Some goes for OpenSolaris and Solaris itself. I’ve tried all of them and I think they are great for servers, but for my desktop? Hmm…

RESUMÉ
What’s the resumé of this pretty long post? I don’t know. That’s the reason why I type it. I would love to write: Hey, I installed Debian on my Desktop from scratch and I’m super happy with it, but that’s not the truth.

OS X is the thing for the MacBook – fine, but not for this PC (I’m happy to leave those days behind me, because when you think everything should work find and you get a Kernel Panic suddenly on the screen showing you the middlefinger – you have to keep cool to not freak out because of all the time and work you’ve invested in this ungrateful shitty machine!!!).

Windows is currently installed. I’m typing this on Firefox in Vista while Trillian Astra Beta runs the same time. Aero is set up and I hate it So, I think that’s not the way I want to go.

Linux is the system I would love to use, but I want it sexy. The current Ubuntu comes with a funky and very very good antialiasing, but I’ve not idea how to get this into Debian. Fedora 11 download (DVD/ISO) has just finished. Ubuntu 64bit CD also lays on the desk, ready for a boot from the LiveCD.

I would love to use a system like Milo from StartUp and know what to do. Oh! Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not an expert, but I feel familiar in the console and know what I do there. Ok – the theme is not available anywhere – believe me, I’ve spend a lot time on searching for it.

While writing the last chapter here, I thought about really risking it and installing Debian again. The hardware is not that big problem anymore. Everything got much much easier compared to my Fedora Core 2 days. Even my color laser printer should work out of the box now. But there’s also a bit a afraidness to really use it. You could say, that I was tainted by OS X. Everything looks so nice and friendly in OS X, when I check Linux screenshots I often thing “OMG! How could they…??” and click the screenshot away. I’m a learned Mediadesigner and I love digital art, that’s why I possibly feel so good on OS X – until I want to change something deep inside the OS. That’s why I like Linux, doing things can be easy, but can also be damn complicated. But let me tell you one thing, even Windows can be hellish complicated. Ever tried to install an Exchange server on a bland Windows Standard x64 Server? Much fun, dude!

I’m seeking out for a good conclusion to come to an end of this story/report, but I can’t find one.

So – this could be more a dialog than posts before. Please, leave some comments if you want to. Maybe someone else who reads this feeld the pain of selecting the right OS and is unsatisfied (or was – what could be most helpful ) with all available systems.

Have a nice night!

Ciao
Dennis

EDIT
Attached, 3 screenshots from the motion picture “AntiTrust” (StartUp).

Tweet This Post Digg This Facebook Reddit