[ale] New laptop

[Adric Net]

On Sep 30, 2009, at 11:10 PM, George Allen wrote:
>
>
> How about windows on mac? I have an application I use at work that
> sends data to a radio over a proprietary protocol via serial port.
> Works with usb-serial adapter... But not with linux or vista. XP only.
> Haven't tried it from within virtualbox yet. Can you run xp on a bare
> partition instead of virtualized on a x86 mac?

Yes, using their BootCamp tools. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3777
AFAIK I know VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop for Mac can
boot out of a partition as well as a disk file, giving you some  
flexibility
there.

Re: X Window, Gnome and KDE:
An X Window server (XQuartz: http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki )
  is an optional install in recent Mac OS X. It runs rootless by  
default with
a window manager that gives Mac-like title bars to X Window windows.
Most common OSS applications (gimp, etc) have binaries  available that
use this and some support the (newer) native (no X Window) bindings
for GTK and QT. Openoffice 3 for mac is native, for instance and kde4
will build and run native.

re:ports
You'll want to read up on Fink and Macports, the two major pkg/port
systems. To be very general fink is debian (uses apt and dpkg) and
macports is BSD ports (vaguely like Gentoo). Fink packages are generally
more stable and macports usually more up to date... but they carry
different versions and different packages http://fink.sf.net and http://macports.org

Let me know if I can answer any more questions about Mac for Linux  
hackers ;)

hth,
adric