Joe’s Blog!

Ok, so I want to get a second power supply for the new MacBook. The MacBooks come standard with a 60w but the MacBook Pro’s come with a 85w. The two power supplies are the same price at the Apple Store. Can I use the higher powered one with my MacBook? Here’s the answer,

From http://www.macworld.com/2006/05/firstlooks/macbookfaq/index.php

I already own a MacBook Pro—can I use the power supply that came with it on a MacBook? If you hold the two power supplies side by side, you’ll notice that the MacBook Pro’s is larger. That’s because the MacBook Pro uses an 85-watt power supply, while the MacBook uses a 60-watt power supply. Apple says you can use the more powerful, 85-watt power supply with a MacBook without any problems, and that in 80 percent to 90 percent of situations, you can use the MacBook’s power supply with the more-demanding MacBook Pro as well. If you’re really taxing the MacBook Pro’s processor with some heavy-duty work, the MacBook’s adapter will still be able to power the MacBook Pro—but it may not have any power left over to charge its battery.

He’s been kicking some butt in the Bubba Cross series.

I took the plunge, I purchased a MacBook from my brother and his wife. I have had it for about 24 hours maybe and have most of the kinks worked out. The first kink was to remove OSX, that was fairly easy. One thing I noticed though is that if your boot partition is not the first partition on the drive then the Apple BIOS (EFI thing or whatever) will not detect it. As such I had to delete all my partitions and arrange them in such a manner that Steve Jobs approves of. Outside of that the installation of Ubuntu Gutsy was cake. I have been attempting to rearrange the keyboard a bit which is mainly the only other issue I have ran into. I have been able to get the apple key to turn into ALT but not the ALT button to turn into SUPER. My xmodmap output:

[zeusfaber@der-dieb ~]$ xmodmap
xmodmap: up to 3 keys per modifier, (keycodes in parentheses):

shift Shift_L (0×32), Shift_R (0×3e)
lock Caps_Lock (0×42)
control Control_L (0×25), Control_R (0×6d)
mod1 Super_L (0×40), Alt_L (0×7d), Meta_L (0×9c)
mod2 Num_Lock (0×4d)
mod3
mod4 Super_L (0×7f), Hyper_L (0×80)
mod5 Mode_switch (0×5d), ISO_Level3_Shift (0×71), ISO_Level3_Shift (0×7c)

Also regarding the keyboard, it seems that by default Mac’s have the ‘fn’ key pushed down at all times. This allows one to use the F1 – F12 keys for stuff like changing the volume and screen brightness. I changed this to the opposite, now they act as F* buttons normally and when ‘fn’ is pushed they act as special functions. I used ‘pommed’ to do this, just change ‘/etc/pommed.conf’:

fnmode = 2

Another change I made was to how the keyboard and touchpad work. I am not used to using a touchpad due to years of using IBM/Lenovo laptops. So I had trouble using the keyboard and not hitting the touchpad which would cause my cursor to go flying and start typing somewhere else. As such I used syndaemon to put a timer on my touchpad keeping it inactive while typing. On startup I have the following run, it delays the touchpad for 1 second after typing.:

syndaemon -d -t -i 1.0

So far so good.

I found a few good pages for setting this stuff up, check out:

MacBook – Ubuntu Wiki

Touchpad – syndaemon

Some guy’s Mactel Personal Setup Page

MacBook – Gentoo Wiki

Welp folks it’s official, I have been employed by good ol’ Contegix for two years. On Oct 24th 2005 Matthew and Craig took a a risk on a wanna-be pro cyclist who just got back from racing bicycles in Europe and recently graduated from college. That same day I took a risk on a linux hosting company that until a few weeks prior worked out of little more than a storage closet on the same floor as a datacenter. The company hasn’t stopped growing since and recently being promoted to lead engineer makes things seem like they worked out nicely.

Speaking of growth, do you need a job and happen to have linux skills? We may be looking for someone just like you. Give us a call 314.621.8105.