How about Darwine? Is it any good?
Well, I have Mac Office anyway, so it’s no sweat to install Entourage in the meantime while I await Snow Leopard (Mac OS names are only slightly less dorky than Linux names).
As for Darwine, etc., my initial research indicated that VMWare and to a lesser extent Parallels are head and shoulders above the freebie VMs. It just looks like VMs never really go “idle” since they’re continuously emulating all the background stuff of the OS they’re running, so they’re battery hogs. Be nice if they had a “pause” button.
Actually darwine (crossover I think is a commercial version) is a port of wine which is totally different tech than your typical virtual machine. It’s more of a version of the windows api that runs on linux (or in this case osx). I tried it on locknote. You actually just run the windows exe as if you were in windows. The app launches very quickly. If it supports your one off app this might be a good solution.
When I close locknote though it throws some error though it seems to have run just fine. I’m still messing with it to see if I can make it more silent. Because right now darwine likes to open up x11, some log window, process window, and all this other junk when you launch a windows exe.
I can’t imagine Darwine is a good solution for running a corporate Outlook install, though. Even if all the Exchange server stuff worked, there’s also the Windows rights management add-on for secure e-mail, etc. It’d be mighty impressive if that was all seamless.
I agree it’s probably not going to do outlook well if at all but for one off little windows utilities that you can’t find a native osx solution it’s not bad.
Outlook 2007 under Crossover will run fine but won’t connect to my Exchange server using a VPN… using the default network interface it does fine. (Haven’t tried Outlook 2003 - I don’t have an install CD for that handy) So definitely check the eval version first to see if works for your office/vpn setup. For now I’m back to using Outlook 2007 with Parallels (since any time I’d need to check it with my laptop, it’d be through a VPN), but it isn’t ideal by any means. (For everyday use I run a sync utility to mirror my Exchange email to a Google Apps account that I can monitor via IMAP. It’s a horrible security violation, probably!)
Incidentally I’ve had my new MBP for about 2 weeks now and I couldn’t be happier. The battery life is insane, averaging about 5 hours of use with wifi running. Running a 3D app like WoW will chop that to about 2 hours. The multitouch mousepad is great, feels very responsive and the two-finger scrolling gesture is easy to get used to. The price is still about twice that of a similarly outfitted Dell, but it’s worth it to me just for the extreme battery life and ability to run OSX without extreme hackery.
New mac recruit here too. Picked up a 13" MBP to do iphone development on. So far it’s pretty slick. Mac OS X takes a bit to get used to, and there’s some little annoyances but it’s been pretty good. The hardware is crazy awesome though, I’ll give it that.
One of us! One of us! I went ahead and bought crossover. It’s so much more polished than darwine and it runs my locknote perfectly. Neat tech but it’s pretty pricey though.
Going into the apple store still creeps me out. The worst was when I bought the macbook. I guess it came up in conversation that this was my first mac. The sales person was trying to push all this mac software crap, mobile me, etc. I was tempted to just say look I’m just going to go home, format the sucker, and install windows 7 :-) Anyways, when I checked out and they handed me the goods they said “Welcome to the family”…creepy.
I was tempted to just say look I’m just going to go home, format the sucker, and install windows 7 :-)
If that’s seriously your intent, there are cheaper laptops for that. :)
Yeesh.
We don’t have actual Apple stores here (or even a real presence, beyond a marketing department of two easily annoyed women), but there are a couple of stores with Apple and related products. I was surprised when a girl there didn’t try to push all sorts of crap, and actually knew the products they had.
They tried to sell me a free printer and a whole bunch of shit. But I just kept saying “I just want the laptop” until the transaction was done.
FYI, Mac noobies: copying a directory structure over top of another similar directory structure in Mac OS is not a merge copy. A lot of people find this out the hard way when they delete half of their iTunes library that they never backed up and then can’t redownload.
So like, say your Mac has Please Please Me, With The Beatles and A Hard Day’s Night and your PC has Beatles For Sale, Help! and Rubber Soul and you connect to the PC from your Mac, copy your iTunes Music directory and paste it right on top of the one on your Mac. You get the “a folder with the same name already exists” warning and replace/skip/cancel buttons. In Windows you can hit replace and it merges everything and you end up with all of the albums. On Mac OS your Beatles directory now has Beatles For Sale, Help! and Rubber Soul and that’s it because it has replaced at the Beatles directory level.
You’ll know you’re a fully converted Mac zealot freakazoid when you actually try to convince people that this way of copying files is better.
By the way I think the solution to the problem is to use the command line program ditto to do the copy but I haven’t had to actually do that yet. Or, in the case of iTunes you could let iTunes manage your library and do all of the copying for you. Anyway, it’ll probably ruin a few hours of your life at some point.
Yeah, THAT sucks and I think every new Mac user gets burned at least once doing that. I love Macs but I would never argue that that behavior is correct. shudder
So to automate a few simple tasks like copying some files from a samba share would I use applescript? Is that sort of the equivalent to batch/cmd files over on dos/windows?
It does seem like there should be a ‘Merge’ choice in there as well. I know Apple likes to keep choices like that simple, but it could give the poor newbie pause to wonder “Wait, what’s the difference? I’d better check the help on this…”
(I’ve been bitten by it too, but long enough ago that I’d forgotten about it until this thread reminded me.)
Well, the option DOES say “Replace” but if you’re coming from Windows you expect a different behavior. It would be interesting to hear the historical reasons for it working the way it does. I can’t think of when you would ever want that to happen.
One clear case would be where you’re overwriting an app with a new version. It’s fundamentally really just a directory replacement operation, and you definitely don’t want it to merge the trees or you could wind up with a mess of mismatched app support files.
So, Finder would have to suppress the ‘merge’ option in that case. Avoiding special cases and unintended consequences like that might be a good reason they wouldn’t want to offer a ‘merge’ option.
In daily operation though, to the average user, applications aren’t folders - they’re just files with an .app extension. Finder is already doing a bunch of special case stuff for them but … yeah, I can see what you’re saying. It would be easier coding on their side to leave it this way but it definitely burns people at first. “Hey, where’d the old files go? WTF?!”
Good to know! I was unaware of this behavior in the Mac OS. I’ll pass on this info to my wife, who uses our MBP the most.
You guys apparently never used UNIX. Like most people. Hah.