Vincent Cheung

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Tuesday, June 08, 2004

MacOS X in WinXP! and Mac's

I'm running MacOS X 10.3.4 in WinXP!

PearPC emulates the G3 hardware like how VirtualPC / Wine / etc. emulates X86 hardware. The software's open source and at a really, really early stage, not to mention slow, but it works...

The installation is long and complicated, but luckily I found an image off BitTorrent that had MacOS X 10.3.4 installed for PearPC! The installation was a snap. Just a few modifications to the config file and off I went!

It doesn't currently have network capabilities under WinXP, and the installation was pretty barebones (no iTunes, and other stuff, well, maybe, I haven't looked around too much).

I want to get a laptop this summer and am thinking of getting a Powerbook or maybe an iBook. I used to have a PowerMac, but left it behind when I came to Toronto. I like Mac's. It's a nice change from all the Windows machines and nicer than Linux, but with a Unix backbone. Mac's have everything I need to do research (Java, Matlab, bioinformatics stuff (BLAST), Offic) and play (movie players, iTunes, games, misc apps (Azureus runs on Java :))). They run fast and smoothly with few problems. The laptops are quite nice. The Powerbook I'm looking at is a G4 1.5 GHz with built-in 802.11g (for my home network), Bluetooth (potentially useful, maybe use with my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard), USB 2, Firewire, 80G HD, 512MB RAM, TV-out (movies), VGA port (video projectors), 15" screen, kick-ass video card (not that I'm too into that though), DVD and CD burner (the Superdrive), but the battery life is only 4.5 hours (with Wi-Fi on, like 3 hours, DVD watching is like 2 hours...) plus about $3000. The iBook's a little worse off (slower, less memory and hard drive space, no DVD burning, no Bluetooth), but cheaper ($2000) and surprisingly, longer battery life, apparently 6 hours! But doesn't look as nice (white plastic casing as opposed to aluminum and a tad heavier) and the screen's only 14" instead of 15", with a lower resolution - 1024 x 768 instead of 1280 x 832 (not sure about the res of the 15", but something close - it's a wide screen). I don't plan on doing too much computationally on my laptop, but would end up running some stuff on there. Apparently, it runs BLAST quite a bit faster than with a DELL P4 3.2 GHz desktop (which is what I have at school :p).

I gotta figure out how the laptop stuff'll go soon since I'm going back to Winnipeg on the 17th (London (the real one) from 10th - 16th with my sisters). My prof said previously that all phd students get their own laptops, I'm gonna be transferring into PhD soon, but want laptop now. Not sure if I have to get one through him or if he can reimburse me (which would be preferred cuz then I get to choose my laptop). Not sure how much he would reimburse, cuz the Powerbooks is definitely one of the more expensive laptops, not that my desktop is cheap, c'mon, 2 GB of RAM!

Anyways, night time.

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