I have grown to love my iPod, but it died and I thought about replacing it. As ever, Apple gets a premium price for their hardware, there are much cheaper MP3 players out there.
More importantly, there are players that are less committed to DRM, the god-forsaken digital copy
protection scheme that makes it hard to listen to your own music. After poking around I found the Sandisk Fuze. I have been buying SanDisk flash for years, so I figured their core technology had to be OK. I bought an 8 GByte model for $80. It comes with a radio too -- and can record off the radio!
When you mount it on your computer, it just looks like a harddrive, or a thumb drive. You just drag songs on and off of it. Easy -- no special, complicated, Windows only software like iTunes. It also supports the
ogg-vorbis format, an open source music format.
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Have you (or do you know anyone) who has installed a version of Linux on a Mac (running OS X) using VMWare?
I have successfully gotten Windows up and running on my Mac Laptop, but I'd like to have a Linux virtual machine too.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Amigo van Helical
Dear Amigo
Here I lift from a post I found.
I HAVE installed VMWARE on Debian to run Windows, but I have no experience running it on a Mac.
My general advice is to just dedicate a machine to Linux. Particularly when one is getting started, it is annoying to deal with the multi-OS issues, which are almost inevitably complicated. If you find a dead POS with a 5 GByte hard drive and 100 MBytes of RAM you can STILL install Ubuntu or Debian on it and mess around.
Thank you for being my first commenter. Your friend -- Richard
A look at VMware Fusion
By Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier on September 06, 2007 (9:00:00 PM)
If you're a Linux user who's just been issued an Apple computer, you might want to look into a virtualization solution for Mac OS X. VMware's Fusion, which was officially released from beta at the beginning of the month, works well for running Linux (or other x86/AMD64 OSes) on the Mac desktop, and provides a great solution for multi-OS users who need simultaneous access to all their operating systems on the same machine.
Unlike the multi-step process for installing VMware products on Linux, the Mac installer is a simple package file that walks through the process quickly and painlessly. I didn't time it, but on a MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM and a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, I was using Fusion in less than 10 minutes. If you miss the gazillion-and-one questions asked by VMware's Linux installer, you'll be pleased to know that the VMware Tools package provided with Fusion for Linux guest OSes still requires the same kind of interaction.
Installing and running VMs in Fusion
After installing Fusion I did a regular install of Ubuntu Feisty using the standard Feisty install ISO. Ubuntu installed without a hitch, and I was using Feisty under Fusion in less than 30 minutes.
One thing to beware of -- when you insert CD-ROMs or DVDs, Fusion grabs the media by default for the virtual machine, even when it's not in the foreground. This behavior snagged me a few times while I was running a virtual machine in the background and was waiting for the optical media to show up in Mac OS X's desktop.
Overall, performance in the VMs and on the Mac desktop was good, though I did notice if I was doing anything that caused a lot of disk activity in the guest OS -- like untarring a large tarball -- it would cause some sluggishness for the host OS as well.
Seamless display of Windows apps (almost)
One of the most interesting features of VMware Fusion is Unity, which allows you to display Windows apps on your Mac desktop without seeing the entire Windows desktop. For instance, if you want to run Internet Explorer to see how a Web site you're designing displays in IE, you can use Unity to run IE without having to move in and out of the Windows virtual machine.
Even more useful, you can keep a program's icon in the Mac OS X dock to allow you to launch programs normally, without mucking with the launch window provided by Fusion. This even works when the virtual machine is shut down. If you have an application docked and run it while the virtual machine is shut down, it will start the virtual machine and launch the application.
Fusion also glitches a bit when you send some applications to the dock, then resume them. When I'd relaunch Word from the dock, I'd see brief flashes of the Windows desktop as it resized Word.
Overall, though, Unity works pretty well, and will be extremely useful for Mac users who need to run a couple of Windows apps but have no need to deal with the entire Windows desktop.
It's all well and good that you can use Unity to run Windows apps as if they were native OS X apps, but where's the same feature for Linux?
Once again, Linux users are treated as second-class citizens. Linux runs just fine under VMware Fusion -- but you're stuck with switching between the Mac desktop and the Linux desktop, unless you install Apple's X11 packages and export applications onto your Mac desktop that way -- which isn't as seamless or useful as Unity. This is a shame, because a lot of Linux users also have Mac laptops, and lack of this feature makes it a pain to access Linux desktop apps that Linux users come to depend on.
How Fusion measures up
In some ways, Fusion outshines its Windows- and Linux-based cousins. Unity is a must-have feature for running Windows apps on Mac OS X, and none of VMware's apps for Windows or Linux has a similar feature. Fusion is also ahead of VMware's other products when it comes to DirectX support, for gamer-types who want to run their 3-D games on their shiny Mac OS X machines.
If you are a Mac user, I'd recommend looking at Fusion if you need to run Linux or Windows, or other x86/AMD64 OSes, on the Mac. Aside from a few small glitches with Unity, Fusion worked flawlessly and was easy to use. It's not cheap, but it's a lot less expensive than Workstation, and will probably meet the needs of most Mac users.
Dear picardout
Thanks for the tips and the "lifted post". It looks as though no matter what route I go I should get some linux install disks. I will have to look into that as soon as I can.
AvH
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