Powerbook Setup

[Paul Robinson]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 11:51:00AM -0400, John Baldwin wrote:

> Thinkpads are quite expensive, more so than other PC laptops, so that pretty 

See eBay. A Celeron-based Thinkpad with bluetooth shouldn't cost you
more than $600. How much are iBooks and Powerbooks again? Even
second-hand?

> my several test machines, etc.  You keep assuming I'm somehow selling out to 
> Apple.  Perhaps you didn't notice, but I'm a FreeBSD core team member and 
> very prolific kernel developer.  I kind of get the whole open source thing.  

Yeah, John, I know who you are man. :-)

My point is that on the one hand we have all these people proclaiming
Open Source to be the greatest thing ever, whilst at the same time
paying over the odds for Junior Unix on over-priced hardware to a
company that keeps most of the really neat stuff to itself under closed
source. Do you not see some element of duality in their standards there?
Don't you think there is a kind of contradiction anywhere?

See, at work I look after a 6-way Windows 2003 cluster. I think it rocks
at what it does. I've signed off on purchases of Microsoft Content
Management Server, SQL Server, etc. and I *know* that the £500k that
went down that hole *could* have been better spent helping fund work on
an open source CMS and back-end tools like MySQL. Problem is, there were
other major political forces in my way. I know there was a
double-standard on my part there, and I know my support of that Windows
architecture shows duplicity in my own beliefs, but I want to try and
get to the bottom of the OS X crowd who are splitting from FreeBSD. What
are the actual factors involved in their decision, and are they really
as vacuous and empty as excuses as I suspect they might be? I want to be
proven wrong here.

> Different tools are good at different things, and I am quite comfortable with 
> FreeBSD + KDE, but I also like OS X as a desktop.  The fact that I can fire 
> up X11.app and then ssh in and run kmail, etc. over ssh just as in FreeBSD is 
> quite handy.  It also has native p4 binaries and xemacs in darwinports 
> allowing me to even do kernel development on the powerbook when I'm at home.

OK, but what would it take for you to see FreeBSD + X + whatever is
better than OS X? I say it already is, but seriously, what would it
actually take to get there? A different theme in KDE? What is the actual
point of OS X if you already have FreeBSD? OS X is great if you're used
to System 9. I don't see the upgrade path from FreeBSD. Can somebody,
somewhere, please explain it to me beyond the vacuous details of how
their Powerbook "looks neat" or that they like the fonts or the bouncing
icons or whatever. Please?

> Umm, I'm not exactly a moron with X, but X does not have the feature of 
> popping up a dialog box on each display letting you tune the resolutions 
> independently and on the fly detach and attach displays properly.  Xorg and 

OK, there, now we're getting to the core of matters. I never need to
switch resolutions on different displays, beyond Ctrl-+/- work when
connecting to a 21" monitor. But the work required to do that is not
extensive. And is that really the biggest draw to OS X? A dialog box
instead of a keyboard shortcut or line in XF86Config?

> XFree86 4.4 are better than older releases, but they still have a long way to 
> go.  Also, as someone who actually works on the code to get suspend/resume to 
> work on some laptops (my Dell is now finally able to do S3 and S1 for the 

I have to admit I wasn't aware of that, but one reason cited for Apple
kit and OS X being "better" than FreeBSD laptops to me, was that
suspend/resume "just work". But for me, it's "just worked" since like,
well... since forever. 

> past half year at least in part due to work I helped with for PCI and other 
> parts of the kernel) it still doesn't work completely (my Alienware can't 
> come back from S3 yet because the kernel doesn't properly handle DPMS yet so 
> the LCD never gets turned back on).  That means that I can appreciate how 
> well OS X does handle the power management angle.  I've also spent several 
> hours trying to see if I could get my laptops to properly report remaining 
> battery time, but to no avail thus far.

I admit, one thing I have not yet got done on my old Thinkpad 240 was
getting battery time reported correctly. I have had it work before, but
not recently. I will concede there, but nowhere else. :-)

> Well, all I can say is that given that I personally know some of the people 
> who now work on OS X that used to work on FreeBSD, I think you are just 
> spouting random opinions without any basis in fact.

You've just said it. Some people claim there is no brain drain, yet you
yourself admit that there are people out there who USED to work on
FreeBSD who no longer do so, because they're off playing with OS X. I
don't have a real complaint with them, but shouldn't we be trying to
stop this, or do we all just pack up now and just make 6.0 a link to
Darwin and advise everybody to go out and but Apple gear instead?

Wouldn't it be nice if instead of accepting defeat we were able to find
ways of funding those people who used to work on FreeBSD full time to
come back? I'm not saying it can be done, I'm saying is that not better
than just having a mass exodus to somebody else's OS?

> I already pointed out MSDOSFS.  There is still more work there to be merged 
> back.  Also, Apple funded much TrustedBSD work on Darwin that is now going to 
> be brought back into FreeBSD and can be done so because the Darwin effort was 
> funded.

That's nice and everything, but what I meant was, is the biggest draw to
Darwin over *BSD the MSDOSFS stuff? Is there anything else in there that
is worth porting? I accept TrustedBSD, but I thought most of that was
now done?

-- 
Paul Robinson

http://www.iconoplex.co.uk/
  "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; 
   the point, however, is to change it." - Karl Marx