I hate Apple and HP

A couple months ago I bought a new MacBook. For the most part I've loved it, but last night I ran into a problem.

When I bought my Mac, Apple was offering a $100 rebate on the purchase of a new printer to go with it. The sales guy pointed out that there are number of printers that cost around $100, so the printer would be essentially free. I chose an HP C4280 All-in-One. Look at that! If it wasn't for sales tax I would have made five cents off of the purchase. Well, you get what you pay for

As a printer it's worked fine. I didn't even need to install any drivers. I plugged it in and it just worked. Of course, that's what I expect from Apple. But last night my wife wanted to scan a document and make it into a PDF. I figured, "Ok, that should be easy." Boy was I wrong.

So I launch Image Capture on my Mac to scan the document. It tells me that I don't have any attached devices. Hmmm. I printed a few minutes ago. Why don't I have any attached devices? So maybe I'm using the wrong application. There's a "scan" button on the printer, so I press that, hoping that the right application will magically open up (see what Apple has done to me!). The printer thinks for a minute, and then tells me that it's not connected through USB. Well, of course it is, because I just printed over USB. I decide to do some Googling

It turns out that while the printer drivers come pre-installed with Leopard, the scanner drivers do not. It's a 192 MB download full of crapware. I hate Apple for making me think that I didn't need to install drivers, and then consuming a chunk of my Sunday evening installing drivers. They set an expectation and then disappointed. It would have been much better to just make me install all the drivers up front.

But why did I say it was full of crapware? Well, let's see. So I scanned the document as a PDF with text (so it has to do OCR) using "HP Scan Pro." That worked. Kind of. I did get a decent looking PDF document with the text correctly converted into text. I also got a completely locked up HP Scan Pro application, and I mean completely locked up. I tried to log out of my Mac, figuring that would clean up the crashed process. Nope! It sat there for a minute, then complained that an application wouldn't exit and asked if it should do it forcefully. I of course said yes, and then it just sat there for a few minutes longer. I got the same result from trying to shut down. At least when you tell Windows that it can violently kill, it violently kills the processes. Apparently MacOSX is too polite, or at least has more patience than I do.

That's another reason to hate Apple. It was worse than Windows, and using a product purchased from the Apple Store no less.

Fortunately I'm a Unix guy and I know how to violently kill processes.

su ps -ef | grep HP kill -9 pid1 (pidX is the process id of an HP process) kill -9 pid2

Until they are all dead. That worked. Of course in the process of doing this I discovered that there are a couple HP processes running as root, which disturbs me to no end.

What I'd like to ask Steve Jobs is: How many Mac users would know to drop down to a terminal, su to root, and violently kill the processes? I just can't see your average non-techie Mac user doing that. Apple should really do a better job screening the products it sells with new computers.

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Running Linux apps on a Mac using X

John asks:

Please can you post something about how you set up and use X to run your linux apps from your mac? I've been using X to login and use my linux desktop on my mac laptop for a few things but what I would really love to know how to do is to run individual programs which I cannot get running on my mac or haven't got room for.

Certainly! I'll start from the beginning. The Linux distribution I'm using is Fedora Core 6. The instructions should be similar for any other Unix variant. I used the GUI administration screens to do the configuration (I know - LAME!) so that's what I'm going to use here.

1. Make sure your Linux box has a static IP address.

This step largely depends on your network setup, and technically isn't 100% necessary. In order to access your Linux box, you must either know its IP address or have a domain name for it that will be translated into an IP address. If you are on a corporate network there's a good chance that there's already a DNS entry for your Linux box so you just need to know its name. Here's what I did for my home network.

1.1 Login your router and reserve a range of IP addresses so that they will not be assigned out by DHCP.

Please refer to your router's manual for details on how to do this. Depending on your router you may be able to assign a static IP address explicitly to your Linux box based on its MAC address. I could not.

1.2 Configure your Linux box to use a static IP address.

Launch the network config utility. This will require the root password. Edit your ethernet adapter and configure it for a static IP address instead of DHCP. Choose an IP address within the range that you reserved in your router, or one that your network admin has provided.

2. Enable sshd on your Linux box.

You can do this using the "Services" applet or by editing your /etc/rcN.d (where N is the desired runlevel) scripts. Enable the service and start it. Notice that I am at runlevel 3. This is because I'm now running my Linux box in headless mode, so I just want it to boot up to a console login prompt, not a graphical prompt. If you your Linux box boots up to a graphical prompt, and you intend to keep in that way, then you want runlevel 5.

3. Setup a DNS entry on your Mac.

As root, edit your /etc/hosts file and add an entry for your Linux box. So open a terminal window and type:

  cd /etc
  emacs hosts

The line for "gondolin" is the entry that I added: Save the file by hitting Control-X Control-S, then exit emacs by hitting Control-X Control-C.

4. On your Mac, launch X and ssh as follows to your Linux box.

  ssh -X gondolin

The "-X" flag tells ssh to automatically setup your DISPLAY environment variable. Once you are logged in, simply type the name of the application that you want to run, followed by an ampersand.

5. Be careful about some applications.

Most applications work fine when started from the command line, but starting the full KDE or GNOME desktop sessions does not work properly for me. I'm pretty sure that's because on my Linux box they are configured to run locally. There are some applications, such as Nautilus and Konqueror that are setup (and least on my FC6 box) to plug themselves into the desktop manager session. This results in all sorts of weirdness when there is no KDE or GNOME session running. Nautilus tries to start a GNOME session, which brings up an unusable desktop, and Konqueror just acts weird. However, Nautilus works fine if you give pass it the "--no-desktop" command-line option. The following opens Nautilus in your home directory.

  nautilus --no-desktop ~/

That's it! Feel free to post any questions.

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Switch

After about two years of running Linux-only (Fedora, to be exact) at home I've switched to a Mac.  I wanted a laptop, needed a new computer desperately (the old one is almost 6 years old), didn't want Windows, and was tired of messing with Linux configuration stuff.

This weekend I bought a Macbook.  So far I love it.  I was hesitant about the keyboard, which is odd, but I actually like it.  I was nervous about using a touchpad instead of a pointer stick, but somehow the touch pad on the Macbook works substantially better than the one on the HP I use at work.  I was worried about quality problems...we'll see about that one.  I just read about some Macbooks and Macbook Pros having defective harddrives, but the model number on mine is different.

So what have I done so far?

1. Booted the first time.  Wireless worked flawlessly on the first try.  I've spent way too much time making Windows PCs (my wife's, my work laptop, visitors' machines) work with my wireless network.  One of my friends tried to make his Linux laptop work with it and after many hours never succeeded.
2. Installed Eclipse and the Scala plugin, played around with that.
3. Installed AquaMacs - IMHO much better than Emacs on Linux.
4. Surfed the net, poked around, reconfigured some stuff to my liking, etc.
5. Setup NFS mounts to my old Linux box. This was amazingly painless on both sides.  The only hiccup was that I had to change my UID on my Mac from 501 to 500, which created some oddities before I logged out and back in, but nothing horrible.  The whole process probably took about 15-30 minutes, compared to hours I spent to make Samba work properly with with wife's Windows XP Thinkpad.
6. Setup sshd on my Linux box and then ran XWindows applications on my Linux box from my Mac.  This whole process took about 10 minutes, and the XWindows apps actually looked good and were very responsive.  Possibly more responsive than running them locally.  Note that this and the above are a tribute to both Fedora and MacOS X.
7. Upgraded my RAM from the stock 1GB to 4GB.
8. Ran my Scala widefinder from Eclipse.  It spikes both CPUs once everything is cached.  Puts both at about half if it has to read from disk.
9. Wrote this blog.

So all that is very positive.  And the UI is so beautiful.  The fonts all look just right...although if I didn't have good eyes I think a lot of them might be too small.

Ok, so what's wrong:

1. I haven't figured out the keyboard shortcut to switch between windows of an open application.  Command tab switches between applications.
2. No page down, page up, home, end, etc keys on the laptop keyboard.
3. The caps lock key is WAY too big.  Keys sizes should be proportionate to usefulness/frequency of use.  Spacebar is huge.  Enter and delete are big.  Caps lock being the size of enter makes not sense.
4. I had to install ~200MB worth of updates fresh out of the box...over half of that for Leopard.  Why can't a new computer to all up-to-date?  Seems like that "genius" who sold it to me could have given me one that was up-to-date.
5. After the reboot for the Leopard updates, everything froze.  Just a blue-grey screen with no cursor.  That's a bad first impression.  But I turned it off and back on again and everything was fine.
6. I had to install codecs for video various video formats.  That's mildly annoying.  Why can't they be preinstalled?  It's not like I had to pay to download and install them.  But what's more annoying is that the first link presented to me for XVid didn't seem to have any appropriate install files for Mac.  I used DivX instead, which worked.

So overall I am very impressed.  I think I'm going to keep my old Linux box around as a server and to run Linux-only stuff over X.  If anything goes wrong I'll be sure to complain about it.

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