Good bye Gentoo - Hello Leopard

The following post was an April Fools Hoax :) While bits of it are true such as I did finally move away from Gentoo as my primary distro its got more to do with lack of time and laziness to reinstall gentoo. Hopefully I'll do another post on me moving to Kubuntu (Ubuntu + kubuntu-desktop package). I did find few annoyances but one should expect that running a beta software. I am happily using kubuntu with full desktop effects that is far superior that of Apple of Microsoft.

I did buy the Mighty Mouse and Apple keyboard as mentioned I wanted a good portable bluetooth device and they worked effortlessly (almost :) on the latest Ubuntu 8.04.

No Leopard's were harmed in creating this hoax as the desktop your seeing on my Acer laptop is actually a full screen screenshot sent to me by Siraj using his Mac notebook which I loaded before taking the picture.


Its been a little over 3 years since I switched from Debian to Gentoo. I still remember my blog post titled "Goodbye Debian, Hello Gentoo" like it was yesterday. Gentoo was a gr8 distro for me since my machine ran like a speeding bullet as a result of being able to optimize it to my old P4 notebook at the time. Actually before loading Gentoo on my notebook I actually ran it a on my AMD64 bare bone system as a 64 bit OS. I later install gentoo on my Mac Mini PPC as well and was loving it.

But then came the painful realization of upgrading packages and I would spend a lot of time on the PPC machine and the AMD 64 machine downloading and compiling packages. You see unfortunately in most cases downloading source code takes up more space than the compiled binary and compiling it on an old PPC system or even an old AMD 64 (2GHz equivalent) was a killer. But I must say I enjoyed it - until of course the system was still half broken and I had to do a revdep-rebuild to rebuild those packages.

Eventually I gave up running Gentoo on those systems and started running Ubuntu or Debian. Till recently my Apple PPC G4 was running Debian but when I upgraded to Leopard (aka Mac OSX 10.5) it replaced the boot loader so now its just running on that. My AMD 64 is running Ubuntu 64 with a Leopard like theme by following the instructions at Mac4Lin.

So basically till last weekend I was only running Gentoo on my main notebook and funny enough it was the same installation I did 3 years ago on my HP P4 notebook. You see when I got this new Acer, I was too lazy to re-install Gentoo so copied the files across and re-emerged everything. And thats how Gentoo is. You can rebuild the whole system and have it like a new one. But for things to work right sometimes you end up recompiling a couple of times only to find by the time your done its time to upgrade again :) But more recently I had a couple of apps which just crashed like wvdial and X with compiz.

So last weekend, I carefully backed up my data and started installing Ubuntu. Since I was already using xorg 7.3 and what not I thought I'd install Ubuntu+1 (aka 8.04 beta). Its one thing to switch from Gentoo to Ubuntu but another to also switch from Kde to Gnome. I've been a Kde user for over 6 years! So I did the apt-get install kubuntu-desktop. Oh boy is kubuntu not so ready. Compared to Ubuntu I find it buggy and not polished at all.

After spending the whole of weekend I managed to get something which sort of resembles my favorite desktop - Leopard.



But it was such a pain. When ever I rebooted the machine kubuntu would not properly start desktop effects. I spent a couple of hours trying to figure this out and even went on IRC #kubuntu but no luck. Finally I nailed it down to a some sort of a dbus error. And that was the last straw! I've had it spending time messing around with my OS. The reason I left Gentoo was to have an easier time enjoying the desktop and now the same thing with kubuntu!!!

All this happened yesterday and I was quite frustrated with Kubuntu and Linux in general. I know linux has come a long way and its still a great OS but when all you want is to "just do it" Linux tends to fail more often. So I was quite frustrated and went for a shower since by then I was feeling so sweaty and sticky. While showering it occurred to me that I was really most comfortable with the Mac OSX GUI than anything else. If you've been following my blog you would remember that I wrote several posts from even before Compiz-beryl was invented on making the desktop look more like Mac OSX. I remember a couple of years back I managed to install a hackint0sh version of OSX Tiger on one of the IBM Thinkpad, so yesterday started looking into it. I had the ISO for Tiger but wanted to install Leopard instead. Luckily I had the ISO's for Leopard also :) since I had upgraded my Mac Mini with it so after following the instructions at this site I managed to get OSX Leopard running on my Acer.

Everything pretty much works great such as Sound, 3D acceleration, Networking, Wi-Fi and even bluetooth. I recently bought an Apple Mighty Mouse since I wanted a bluetooth wireless mouse and it works great. It was so much easier to configure on OSX than on Linux.

So it looks like for the time being until I have a bit more time on my hand I am leaving the OS I spent the last 8-9 years using for an OS I've aspired all other OSes should become. Apple has always been very innovative and I think the desktop OS will be won by them at the end.

I am still a hoping to use a lot of Open Source software from within Mac OSX. When I get more time I might even look into the wonderful Darwin system which is a truly Open Source kernel based on BSD Unix. I am also very keen on getting into Apple's Objective C based CoCoa development using XCode since it will provide me with the means to develop iPhone apps using the SDK. I also hope to buy an iPhone once the 3G version is available. Wooh! can't wait!

Anyway I wrote a lot and I'm quite excited and hope to bring you guys more articles on using Mac OSX!