The Indigestible

To bor­row from a lam­en­ta­ble final chap­ter in a movie tril­ogy,¹ every time I get out, they pull me right back in again.

They being, in this case, gen­eral nerdish tendencies.

Followers of this blog will know by now that I’ve restarted my usage of Linux, in Ubuntu form. I can’t begin to describe what a vast improve­ment Linux has enjoyed since the last time I used it, back in the Red Hat days. Prior to that, as I’ve men­tioned, was Slackware — and for those of you famil­iar with JR “Bob” Dobbs, you’ll know what I mean when I say that ’ware gave every­thing except slack.

But this is about Mac, not Linux, and specif­i­cally mak­ing the Mac Mini work with non-​​Apple wire­less net­works. I’m post­ing it because I’ve seen, first­hand, the kinds of ques­tions that come up in a lot of user forums, and I’m hop­ing it might help oth­ers who are Googling around for answers about get­ting their Minis — or their Macs in gen­eral — work­ing with cer­tain Belkin wire­less net­work­ing prod­ucts, espe­cially their USB wire­less trans­ceivers. Typical ques­tions are “Why won’t my Mac Mini work with wire­less?” and “Mac and Belkin USB wire­less — how?” and “Belkin wire­less USB dri­vers for Mac?”

Okay. Many years ago, I bought an AirPort wire­less modem/​base sta­tion — the Graphite model, imme­di­ately prior to Apple’s release of Extreme.² It’s actu­ally still work­ing just fine, but it’s 802.11B, which in non-​​nerd terms means pretty damn slow, all other things being equal, about 2 MB/​second max­i­mum trans­fer rate. Since my net con­nec­tion is capa­ble of up to 5 MB/​sec down­load, well, it was choking.

My Intel dual-​​core 2 GHz Mini can han­dle G series, which is much faster, and between that and the peri­odic con­nect prob­lems I was hav­ing with the AirPort — plus the fact that AirPort Graphite hasn’t been sup­ported by Apple (sur­prise!) since about 2005 — I thought maybe I’d be bet­ter off with a new wire­less router.

I skipped over the AirPort idea, though. I’m sure it’s just a mat­ter of time — prob­a­bly 3 to 6 months, know­ing my gen­eral luck in these mat­ters — before Apple releases some­thing even bet­ter than an N-​​compliant unit; and besides, third par­ties make N-​​speed routers that cost much less than an AirPort Extreme, to the tune of $100 less. Faster and cheaper.

So I scooped up a Belkin, which has a Mac OS instal­la­tion CD, and while the setup appeared to work fine — I got my Linux net­book and WinMo 6.1 smart­phone talk­ing to it with­out a hitch, though I had to use the Web inter­face rather than their install wiz­ard for arcane rea­sons that few oth­ers will prob­a­bly ever encounter — I had no con­nec­tiv­ity at all from my Mini.

Well, that’s not totally accu­rate; I did get some con­nec­tion, some­times, but it was extremely spo­radic and tended to fail a lot more often than not.³ Those of you who have Minis and have expe­ri­enced this prob­a­bly already know what’s com­ing, so you can skip ahead a lit­tle if you want.
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Came upon a page via another Twitterer today (@blogofinnocence) that made me go a lit­tle cross-​​eyed. Here’s the site quoted in full:

0.999… is the same as 1. Not just very close, but pre­cisely identical:

a = 0.999…
10a = 9.999…
10a – a = 9.999… – 0.999…
9a = 9
a = 1

There’s no trick here. It’s just a math­e­mat­i­cal fact that most peo­ple find deeply counterintuitive.

No, there’s no trick, but there is a fail­ure to parse.
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The rest of you will merely find it baffling.

Yes, that is Ubuntu Jaunty run­ning in emu­la­tion via VirtualBox on my Mac Mini.

Why?

Because I could, that’s why.

Welp, that was an inter­est­ing exer­cise in holy crap. After installing Ubuntu 9.04 (net­book remix) on my Acer Aspire One net­book, things looked great; I switched the sys­tem over to the full Gnome desk­top UI — the remix has a sim­ple launcher as its default — and every­thing just ran slick and sta­ble … until I rebooted, and the sys­tem menu bars were gone.

That’s a bit of a prob­lem, since pretty much every­thing you need to load and run the Gnome GUI resides in those panels.

Oops.
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The Ubuntu install was damn near pain­less com­pared to XP, or even OSX. And by con­trast to the insanely recal­ci­trant Slackware I began with more than ten years ago, well, hell, there’s just no contest.

This is actu­ally an Ubuntu remix opti­mized to work on net­books. It runs well, sig­nif­i­cantly faster than XP did on the “Designed for Windows XP” Acer Aspire One I have. (8 GB SSHD!) No notice­able sys­tem hangs, unlike its pre­de­ces­sor; load­ing a browser was an exer­cise in frus­tra­tion, and even start­ing up a link in a new tab locked the machine for 15 sec­onds or so while the HTML ren­dered. Well, not any more.

Currently I have five vir­tual desk­tops; here’s a screen­shot of the sys­tem load with Firefox, TweetDeck, Tomboy and Evolution running:

You wouldn’t know the net­book has a (more or less) dual core proces­sor, not the way it ran with XP. But Ubuntu’s barely even touched its VM. And you have to admit the GUI eye-​​candy isn’t bad.

Probably the hard­est thing I had to do was get and install synce to sync my smart­phone (I still haven’t found a GUI tool that seems to work in a way I can com­pre­hend); the sec­ond hard­est was set­ting it up to talk to my EVDO cel­lu­lar modem.*
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