On 06 Dec 13:19, Simon Ransome wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
On 06/12/2010 12:59, Brett Parker wrote:
Steve Engledow wrote: *I'D* love a Mac too - there are things a Mac can do in its sleep that Linux and Windows make a banquet of.
Erm, such as?
Remembering that a Mac is just a piece of hardware, and is x86 based...
Do you mean "there are things available in OSX that are difficult in Linux and Windows", in which case, the usual one I hear about is "networking just works, it's lovely!" right up until they hit a network that OSX doesn't know much about, or it's having an off day, or the winds blowing in the wrong direction - at which point it's a complete PITA.
If it's printing, then I'm afraid that OSX is actually just using cups, and an out of the box cups on a modern linux is Damned Good at "just working".
It's very ironic, given that CUPS was largely developed by Apple, that Macs (at least the laptops - a couple of MacBook Pros for work and my wife's white MacBook at home) are actually /harder/ to connect to a CUPS-running Linux server in order to get something to print than, say, a Linux desktop. The Mac "add printer" widget doesn't actually browse the available queues properly, and so you actually have to enter the full CUPS queue path when adding a printer (which is possibly obvious in hindsight but which took ages to figure out as it should have been able to figure this out for itself).
apt-get install avahi-daemon on the linux server, export the printer from avahi, watch as it "just works" on the mac. Mac's tend to rely on bonjour services, which are provided by avahi-daemon in linux. Does tend to make things "a lot" easier.
However, and I'm certainly no Apple fanboi, the one thing I'll give Macs over other laptops OS/hardware combos (in my experience) is that they really seem to have completely sussed out sleep and hibernate - I can close the lid on my MacBook pro and open it minutes, hours or a few weeks later and it's exactly where I left it, every single time. Even if it runs out of battery it almost always manages to perfectly resume from a memory-to-disk dump when it next gets power.
I hibernate my linux laptop twice nearly every working day, and have no issues... so, erm... ;)
Mind you, this might just be a product of better modern technology - it's been a couple of years since I last tried Linux on a (new-at-the-time) laptop, and Windows (which was always traditionally rubbish at hibernate) may *finally* have sussed this out in version 7...
The usual culprits for a failed suspend/resume in linux is bad hardware, i.e. hardware that doesn't behave as it should according to the acpi specs. There's lots of workarounds for known broken hardware these days, though, so that's getting a lot better.