Purchased a 17″ macbook pro

After two years of using ubuntu full time on my laptop, last week I purchased a 17″ macbook pro and could not be happier with my purchase. I intend to keep OS X Leopard on it. Here’s why: I’m getting ready to graduate from Wheaton College (Chicago) in December and simply do not have time to battle ubuntu for hardware support and stability anymore. Don’t get me wrong – I love linux and ubuntu and dislike Microsoft as much as the next linux user. It’s just that my time and nerves are limited. Therefore, I will unlikely be writing any more posts on this blog. My parents are still using ubuntu on their computer but I intend to have them purchase an iMac for their next computer (since I am the computer person in our family). So I guess this is goodbye for now to the ubuntu community. It was fun while it lasted. I learned a lot but it is time to move on.

Fix red/blue color reversal in totem with ATI cards using fglrx

There is a bug in the fglrx driver (surprise!) that causes the red and blue channels to be reversed in totem-gstreamer.

To summarize, simply run “gstreamer-properties” and go to the “Video” tab.
Change the video output plugin to “Custom”
Change the video output pipeline to the following:

ffmpegcolorspace ! video/x-raw-yuv,format=(fourcc)YV12 ! xvimagesink

An easier workaround is to just install VLC media player which plays pretty much any file you throw at it.

How to install a printer that isn’t listed in the printer driver GUI of Gnome or KDE

Recently I tried to install my Epson Stylus C60 printer but to my dismay its driver was not listed in the KDEPrint driver GUI. After much trial-and-fail and searching I finally found that you can simply go to http://localhost:631/ in any browser and easily locate your elusive printer driver. After clicking on “Add Printer” the process is very straight forward and has far more drivers listed. Once you have finished adding your printer you will be pleased to find out that it will appear in the Printing GUI of your desktop environment, (Gnome/KDE,) ready to print.

Restore the Windows boot option to GRUB

If you somehow lost the option to boot into Windows in your GRUB menu, you can get it back by simply adding some text into /boot/grub/menu.lst. Be very careful when editing this file because an error could cause your system to not boot and it would take some work to fix the file.

First, run this command to open up your menu.lst in a text editor:

gksudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Add the following text to the very end of that file:

title Microsoft Windows
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

Keep in mind that you have to change hd0,0 to whatever is your actual windows partition. Look here to read about the GRUB partition naming scheme and to find out what you should change (hd0,0) to. To get a list of all the partitions on your hard disk you can run this command:

sudo fdisk -l

So, for example, if your windows install was located on /dev/sda3, you would change (hd0,0) to (hd0,2).

Make CTRL+Arrow keys move forward/backward one word in terminal

EDIT: This was fixed in gutsy 7.10.

In all text editors, CTRL+Left or Right moves forward or backward one word however by default this is not the behavior of the various terminal emulators in ubuntu. First open your ~/.inputrc. You might have to create this file.

gedit ~/.inputrc

Now paste following lines:

"e[1;5C": forward-word
"e[1;5D": backward-word
"e[5C": forward-word
"e[5D": backward-word
"ee[C": forward-word
"ee[D": backward-word

Now save the file and run this command to update the system without rebooting:

source ~/.inputrc

You should now be able to open a terminal, and move forward and backward one word at a time using CTRL + left or right.

Make Konqueror use your default view mode in new tabs

There seems to be a bug in konqueror where it uses the icon view mode in new tabs even if you have detailed list (or any other mode) selected as the default view mode in the File Management view profile. I found a workaround today on the konqueror bug page.

It’s actually pretty simple and involves no terminal commands. In konqueror, go to Settings, Configure Konqueror. Scroll down and click on “File Associations.” In this section expand “inode” and then click on “directory.” Now, go to the “Embedding” tab. Under “Services Preference Order,” move “Detailed List View” to the top.

Now when you open a new tab in konquerer it will use the detailed list view mode.

EDIT: PCLinuxOS users read here. To set detailed list view as default in PCLinuxOS: Open Konqueror (via System Menu->Home Folder), set view mode to “Detailed List View” and save this setting to the save view profile “File Management”. (Thanks to Dexamillion for this – see his comment below)

Disable firefox going back/forward on horizontal scroll

This is actually quite simple and I have seen many forum posts about this problem. All you have to do is type “about:config” in your browser, and use the search tool to find the following options:

mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action (change it to 0)

mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines (change it to “true”)

Now restart firefox and that annoying behavior should be fixed.

Mp3 support for amaroK in (k)ubuntu linux

It took me awhile to find out how to get mp3 support in amaroK, so I thought I’d share how I did it. It’s quite simple. In order for this to work you must already have mp3 support in other non-xine applications. To find out how to do that you can go here.

Once you are sure you have mp3 support in non-xine applications, all you have to do is install the libxine-extracodecs package:

sudo aptitude install libxine-extracodecs

Now just restart amaroK, and you should be good to go.

If this doesn’t work, you can try running

/usr/lib/amarok/install-mp3

If it still doesn’t work, try running amarok as root. If it successfully plays mp3s when run as root, try this:

mkdir ~/.xine/plugins/ && cp -r /usr/lib/xine/plugins/1.1.4/ ~/.xine/plugins/

That command copies the plugins installed for the root user into your home directory. You should now be able to run amarok like usual (as a user) and play mp3s.

Enable horizontal scrolling on synaptics touchpads in ubuntu linux

For some reason horizontal scrolling on synaptics touchpads is disabled by default in ubuntu. This tip will show you how to enable it.

Before we start, it is important to make a backup of the file we are going to edit. If you make a mistake it is possible that your desktop environment will not start. So, open a terminal (Applications, Accessories, Terminal) and run the following command:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup_touchpad

If you do make a mistake and end up without a desktop environment (X won’t start) then simply hit ctrl+alt+F1 to get to a virtual terminal and run the following commands:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup_touchpad /etc/X11/xorg.conf
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

You should probably write down the above commands if you don’t know what they mean.

Now that we made a backup, we can edit the file:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Find the section similar to this:

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Synaptics Touchpad”
Driver “synaptics”
Option “SendCoreEvents” “true”
Option “Device” “/dev/psaux”
Option “Protocol” “auto-dev”
EndSection

Add the following line before the “EndSection” part, under the other options:

Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "1"

After saving the file and restarting X (Ctrl + Alt + Backspace) horizontal scrolling using the bottom edge of your touchpad should be enabled.

Sometimes the area that the touchpad interprets as a scroll event is too big or too little. To fix this, we can do some tweaking. We don’t want to have to restart X each time we make a change so thankfully we can tweak touchpad settings on the fly before writing them to xorg.conf. First, run:

syndaemon -d && synclient -l

The latter command will output a list of all your touchpad settings. Find the section that looks something like this:

RightEdge = 5250
BottomEdge = 4300

Your values will most likely be different. The “RightEdge” value is the x coordinate of the invisible line of where the touchpad will translate vertical movement into a scroll event. Same for the “BottomEdge” value.

So, if you want to make the area for horizontal scrolling smaller, increase the BottomEdge value from 4300 to 4400:

synclient BottomEdge=4400

You can do this any number of times on any setting that synclient -l outputs. When you’re done, make sure to change the settings in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf like we did above, otherwise after you reboot your settings will be lost. Also remember to follow the syntax of the other options in the touchpad section of xorg.conf.

The truth about the costs of Macs vs. costs of PCs.

Today I was reading digg and was inspired to find out the differences in price between Macs and equivalent PCs, to see if the bit of trouble I go through in using linux is really worth it.

The first thing I did was go to the apple website, and find the cheapest computer they offer. That happened to be a $600 Mac Mini. 1.66 ghz, 512 ram, a 60 gig hard drive, and OS X.

I then did the same on Dell’s website, since they are an average well-known PC manufacturer. Their cheapest computer happened to be a $359 desktop. AMD 3400+, 512 ram, and an 80 gig hard drive. They didn’t have any processors as slow as 1.66 ghz.

Since not many people actually buy these types of computers, I decided to go up in specs. So, I went to the Macbook section of the apple website. A 13-inch black Macbook costs $1499 and comes with a 2 ghz intel processor, 1GB ram, and a 120 GB hard drive.

I found an equivalent dell laptop for $959. The only difference was that the dell has a 15.4″ screen instead of a 13″ one.

I decided to do one more test. I looked at the most expensive laptop on the apple website, the $2799 17″ Macbook Pro. It has a 2.33 ghz processor, 2gb ram, and a 160 gb hard drive.

At Dell’s website, I found a 17″ Inspiron laptop with a 2.16ghz processor, 2GB ram, and a 160GB hard drive for $1,674. That laptop came with integrated intel graphics, so I decided to add on a 256MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS video card. The new price was $1,973. 2.16ghz was the fastest processor they offered with that laptop, but I’d be happy to sacrifice .17ghz of processor speed to save $826.

I have compared the prices of three groups of equivalent Macs and PCs, and all three times the PC was significantly cheaper than the Mac. If you use linux you can also get a refund on the copy of Windows that came with your computer from dell, which would lower the price even more.

---

EDIT: As you can see from the comments about this post, there is a bit of disagreement with my conclusions. The basic disagreements are:
1) Black Macbooks are not a fair comparison because it’s $200 more for black and a 40GB larger HD.
2) Macs come with the iSight.
3) Macs come with much more useful software like iPhoto, iMovie HD, iDVD, Garage Band, and iWeb.
4) Comparing Macs with the Inspiron series of laptops is not fair because the Inspiron series is of lower quality and is less durable than the Latitude series, and therefore cheaper.
5) OS X is better than windows so it costs more.I will offer responses to each of these four arguments.

1) The $959 Inspiron laptop is cheaper than the $1,299 white Macbook, and still has a 120GB hard drive instead of 80GB like the white Macbook.

2) Many laptop manufacturers include cameras in their laptops. One example is IbuyPower. The red laptop costs $1295, comes with a built in camera, extra battery, 256MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 PCI Express Video Card, a 15.4″ screen, 3 USB ports, a firewire port, card reader slot, etc. I guarantee that video card is better than the one you’ll find in a Macbook. Never mind the extra battery and bigger screen.

3) There are numerous free, open source applications that will do all of the same things as all of the aforementioned apple programs excluding maybe Garage Band. If you use linux there are even more and you lose the cost of Windows Vista, lowering the cost of the PC even more.

4) I hesitate to believe the claim that inspirons aren’t as durable as latitudes because if you dropped them both they would both probably break into a million pieces. However, I will still do a comparison. As you can see from this page, a Latitude equivalent with the white Macbook mentioned above still only costs $994 but comes with a 14.1″ screen and free upgrade from a 4 to 6 cell battery.

5) I do not disagree that OS X is far superior to windows in most cases. The lack of spyware, viruses, and malware generally make it much less troublesome to use. Plus, the adoption of Intel chips and programs like bootcamp allow OS X to run any windows program that one needs that is Windows-only. (autoCAD, etc). That said, if you subtracted the cost of the operating systems ($129 for OS X, and $99 for Windows Vista Home Basic) from the total prices of the computer, the cost of the mac would still be greater than that of the PC, excluding the Ibuypower example. However the Ibuypower example isn’t really a fair comparison because it comes with far superior hardware than Macs do.

Another point I would like to make in response to argument 5 is that in my post, I never endorsed windows or recommended it. In fact, at the end I recommended linux because of its low cost ($0), ease of use, security, and the freedom it gives you to choose. The only people that OS X should be “easier to use” for are people that don’t know anything about computers and are afraid to learn. Once someone gets past the basics of how a computer works, any GUI-based operating system is equally easy (or difficult) to learn/use. I don’t want to use anecdotal evidence but when I was in high school I installed ubuntu on my parents’ new computer and they use it just fine.

In conclusion I would like to assert that Mac people need to acknowledge that they are indeed paying for a name and inclusion in a supposedly elite social club. It’s the same reason that generic products in grocery stores are cheaper per ounce than name brand products. The same principle applies to clothes and pretty much any other product that exists.