New Ground
A few days after deciding to embark on this crazy plan, it occurred to me that perhaps I should get used to running a real Linux distro on my MacBook if I’m to make this work. Sure, Mac OS X is pretty UNIX’d up, but the goal here is to get used to something a little more unfamiliar. The MacBook was happily running Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex) a few months ago, but was sadly just a curiosity at the time and didn’t get much love. So, about a month ago I formatted the drive and threw on Jaunty Jackalope which mostly pleased except for one big problem: gksu crashed and crashed hard.
It’s a bit of a show-stopper, since this is the process by which admin access is granted through the GUI, meaning that the whole system grinds to a stop whenever the system tries to do something like install an update to patch bugs. On the other hand, this can’t be affecting every Ubuntu user, or there would probably be a lot more talk about it. Chances are, there’s a very specific set of circumstances that conspire to invoke the bug, and I’m just unlucky enough to match said circumstances. The whole thing could probably be fixed up by patching the system via command line instead, but after a week of this I had already moved on:
Instead of getting familiar with just one distro, why not a few? Ubuntu was nuked and replaced by Fedora 10. This might seem a slightly crazy idea with Fedora 11 just around the corner, but the purpose of this exercise is after all to get used to installing and using different distros, so why not? Fedora also supports HFS+ out of the box, which is tremendously cool. Not only can I mount my Mac OS X partitions, but it even supports the directories’ permissions. Better yet, Fedora apparently is one of the focuses of the *nix admin course. Sold. So far so good, and only getting better.
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