How’s that for a lucky bastard. Yesterday I got my brand new Apple MacBook Pro to replace my somewhat aged, but still well functioning Dell Inspiron 9100. My employer got me the 17″ version with the high resolution screen (1920 by 1200). It has plenty of memory (4GB) which might come in handy for all my virtualization needs. This is my first Mac and already I’m loving it to death.

First of all the hardware. This is such an elegant machine. I used a Dell inspiron 9100 which has a height of 5 cm. People always thought the Dell came with a builtin docking station. I’ve had my share of mockery but the Dell was fast with a desktop Pentium4 3.2 Ghz. Now this Mac is from another planet. It’s height is only around 1.5 cm. Sure it is bigger since it is a 17″ machine but it is all pixels, baby, just what I need.

Not only the hardware is great I love the operating system (Leopard) as well. The setup procedure is a breeze. The Apple Setup software asks a few questions and off you go. It’s almost too easy. Well it actually is. In my excitement I did things too fast and ended up with a primary user with the Unix username ‘eddieniese’ which is a concatenation of the first- and lastname you’ll have to supply. You can change that during the setup but I sort of overlooked it. I screwed up as I want my username to be just ‘eddie’ which I use all over the place.

Renaming the primary user is not an option. You can create and remove users but you can’t remove the primary user. You can change the ‘gcos’ name of the user but you can’t change the actual username. I could not create another “Eddie Niese” with another username (”eddie”). I did a quick peek around but manually changing the username (/etc/passwd and renaming the home directory) will not do the trick. My best bet was to run the setup again. I didn’t want to reinstall from DVDs I just wanted to run the setup again. I’ll show you how to do that in another article because we have to get under the hood for this. I got it to work using various sources on the internet.

As a die hard Unix user I feel right at home on the system but the most amazing thing is that you don’t have to be a Unix buff to use this Mac. Everything just works like you expect and that is really a great achievement by the designers of the OS. When you run Linux or BSD you just have to know your way around in Unix. Without profound Unix knowledge your like dead wood in the water. Not so on Mac OS X. Really amazing.

I’m very happy with this new laptop. I hope it will be my daytime companion for many years to come. This weekend I’ll be installing everything I need (lots and lots of coding and networking tools) and hopefully on monday this puppy is all set for its first day in the office.

Thank you Erik & Frans for letting me enjoy this kind of equipment. I really appreciate this.

Tags: darwin, MacBookPro, OSX

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 8:57 and is filed under gadget. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.