Three weeks with a MacBook Pro laptop

April 7, 2006 on 7:00 pm | In Apple | 1 comment

MacBook Pro laptop

I have been using my MacBook Pro for the past three weeks. The MacBook Pro is a great laptop, perfectly suited for development work. The laptop delivers incredible performance, thanks to its Core Duo Intel CPU and the high-end ATI X1600 graphics chip. After using an iBook G3 for the past four years, I am simply blown away by how fast things get done with this new laptop. What used to take minutes (for example, restarting Tomcat 5.5 under NetBeans 5.0) now completes in a matter of seconds. The boost in performance has put the fun back in programming as I now spend more time actually writing and testing code than waiting for the computer to complete an operation.

Comparing the MacBook Pro to an oldish iBook G3 is like comparing apples to oranges, some may say. And, they would be right. However, other people who have been using Powerbooks and faster laptops are just as amazed as I am by their new MacBook Pro laptops. Geert Bevin reports that his newish Acer Ferrari laptop is shamed by the performance of the MacBook Pro. Apparently, the latter compiles his programs about 30% faster than the former.

Developers had to make the switch to Mac OS X in order to use a Mac in the past; now, with an Intel CPU driving the MacBook Pro and the possibility to run Windows on it, they no longer have an excuse not to switch. With the MacBook Pro dual-booting Mac OS X and Windows, they have the best of both world: the availability of Windows software and the build quality of Apple hardware and the robustness of Mac OS X.

If you are looking for a new laptop, you should seriously consider the MacBook Pro.

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How to switch off a screen laptop under Linux

December 23, 2005 on 8:00 am | In Linux | Add a comment

In this article how to minimise power consumption on a laptop running Linux by switching off the backlight on the screen. This will help save energy as well as reducing the amount of time the fan needs to run. The instructions have been tested on a Dell Latitude C810 running Ubuntu Linux 5.10.

The first part was easy to achieve. It simply required setting the correct governor for the CPU frequency with the following command. 

echo powersave > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor

Under Breezy, this is executed at run-level 2 from /etc/rc2.d/S30freq-scaling.

It took a bit more work to get the second result. Out of the box, Breezy does very good power management, but some problems still exist due to the inevitable incompatibility of Linux with some laptops.

The first problem with mine was that ACPI events, such as activation of the lid button, were not reported by the kernel. To fix this, an additional option had to be passed to the kernel at boot time by modifying GRUB’s menu.lst as follows.

title           Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.12-9-686
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-9-686 root=/dev/hda1 acpi_irq_balance ro quiet splash resume=/dev/hda5
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.12-9-686
savedefault
boot

The second problem seems to be related to the NVIDIA Linux driver that prevents the screen from switching off with xset dpms force off. The solution is to use _vbetool_, which is marked as causing un-expected behaviour in the “man” pages. Nevertheless, I tried it with the Dell Latitude C810 and found it to work fine.

I created the following script to turn the screen on or off. (This actually controls the backlight and does not just blank/unblank the screen.)


#!/bin/sh

case "$1" in
        on)
                /usr/sbin/vbetool dpms on
                ;;
        off)
                /usr/sbin/vbetool dpms off
                ;;
        *)
                N=/etc/acpi/screen.sh
                echo "Usage: $N {on|off}"
                ;;

esac

Using this script, after Linux boots, the screen can be switched off by issuing the following command.


/etc/acpi/screen.sh off

Alternatively, screen de-activation can be automated by including this command in an appropriate run-level. The same script can also be used to improve the built-in ACPI-related scripts, for example, for suspend, sleep or hibernate power-saving.

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Ubuntu Linux on iBook G3 laptop

December 10, 2005 on 8:28 pm | In General, Apple | Add a comment

I decided to try Ubuntu Linux 5.10 (Breezy) on my iBook G3 laptop after becoming a very satisfied user of the x86 version that runs on my other laptop and my computer at work. In the past, I installed Yellow Dog Linux and a previous version of Ubuntu Linux on the same iBook, but quickly became frustrated by the many tweaks required to make it run all the programs that I needed.

The installation was very easy, but as before I ran into some problems getting the laptop set up with my desired software.

First, Flash is not well supported. There are free open-source alternatives out there, but those are still very unstable and will not play well with all web sites.

Second, Java. Only IBM’s implementation of Java is available for the PPC and it is not even Tiger. I’m a developer, I’m supposed to be able to run the latest Java SDK.

Third, the iBook keyboard does not work as it should. Why should I press F12 to emulate a right-click when Apple said I should be Ctrl-clicking?

Which brings me to the realisation after I was afflicted with this terrible headache that I still have at the time of this writing. If Apple spent so much money on designing proprietary hardware and software that complement each other, it is because they meant those to remain inter-dependent. Never will there be an operating system that will run as flawlessly on an Apple product as Mac OS X. In fact, that is why I bought a Mac in the first place!

I then realised that my frustration was not about not being able to run Linux on this iBook, but rather about having to manage three different operating systems: Mac OS X on the iBook, Linux on the other laptop and Windows XP on the desktop. So now I’m taking another approach and planning on partitioning my computer usage so that each of these systems delivers in the area(s) it is most suited for. My initial plan is to keep the Windows XP machine for my gaming sessions, the Linux laptop as a server (for backup and other things) and the iBook as my main machine.

I will write later to report on my progress in attempting this objective.

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