Productive Again!

After one month of being forced to work
with Mac OS X (Tiger), I feel very relieved being back in my familiar
working environment (which mainly consists out of Gentoo Linux on a MacBook, urxvt, dwm, mutt,
amarok, firefox, pidgin and vim everywhere!).

In the end, I didn’t manage to really fix my laptop. I tried installing a
working grub stage 1, 1.5 and 2 in the dd-backup-image of my root-partition and
putting it back on my laptop’s hard drive, but that didn’t work out. I didn’t
want to spend too much time any more on figuring out why or what, so I decided
to play it rough. I booted my Macbook into FireWire target
disk mode, (which, by the way, is the most awesome feature for a laptop to
have ever!), cleansed the hard disk completely, and performed a Gentoo stage 3
installation form scratch.

One problem. I only have one other Gentoo machine lying around, which is on
a PPC iBook. Can’t compile x86 binaries, let alone an x86 kernel for my MacBook
there (I don’t have any experience with cross-compiled Gentoo installations on
remote FireWire disks). I performed the installation from an Ubuntu machine
then, for which I first had to buy a FireWire PCI expansion card. Problem
again, this was a 64-bit machine, and I didn’t realise it until I had a bogus
kernel. So, rebooted the Ubuntu machine with an x86 Gentoo live CD (all of a
sudden I was happy that these “fake” 64 bit processors^Wnuclear power plants
from AMD and Intel have a 32 bit compatibility mode) to compile a kernel for my
MacBook, and performed the rest of the installation from Ubuntu again, as the
Gentoo live CD didn’t recognize the network interface in that machine.

What I found pretty cool was that, even though this is a fresh install, after
restoring my $HOME backup, everything felt so familiar all at once. Emerging
vim and having all your plugins and settings all setup is great. Emerging
firefox and seeing your bookmarks, stored passwords and URL location toolbar
autocompletion history all in place at once really made me feel like coming
home again after having been away for a long time. :-)

Mac may look nice, and have wonderful hardware… but after one month of OS X,
I just couldn’t manage to feel productive at all. Pity.