Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

travism · Dec 5, 2003, 01:02 PM

Greetings. In the next month of so I will be switching to a Mac. I'm planning on buying the Dual 1.8 G5 (not quite sure how I'm gonna customize it right now).

See, the thing is I've read a lot on Apple's site and other sites information regarding switching from the Windows to a Mac. I've not touched Windows in three years as I've used Linux exclusively during that time. I'd like to know if anyone else has switched from Linux to OS X/Mac and what problems/joys they'd discovered as a result.

tia

travism

Hydra · Dec 5, 2003, 02:41 PM

If you're waiting a month or so - hold out till Macworld in Jan. - prices of current systems may be cheaper and newer/faster systems will be announced and shipping in Feb. Good luck and welcome aboard

-Jerry C.

Landos Mustache · Dec 5, 2003, 02:59 PM

What type of files do you need to move from your old system to your new Mac?

i_wolf · Dec 5, 2003, 06:26 PM

there is always something bigger better and faster coming out though. our company ordered our dual 2GHz about beginning of september and only recieved it about a week and a half ago. (remember they were originally slated to ship in august! so we figured there would be no point in ordered before then. we were expecting a two week delivery! boy did we get that one wrong!

).
IMO there will be announcement in jan but deliveris in march which would be best case scenario. I would love to be proved wrong but historically this has proven the case. And as soon as people start getting their machines in march there will be talk of WWDC in June! ..... IMO get now and enjoy. Chances are you will find that the g5 is far more than ample for anything you can throw at it now or in the next year or so.
Welcome aboard !
On a separate note, if you like the ports collecion there is something similar well... sorta like it called fink which has a collection of ports for darwin (OS X). You'll prob have no probs porting your existing stuff over anyway!
Incidentally you will love your G5 and OS X. we do in the office. in fact we are considering switching altogether. Performance wise the G5's are obliterating anything we have seen coming from the x86 side of the fence (we are using XLF and XLC!

and probably hitting near double real world perf if not significantly higher that what we get from 2Ghz opteron and present 3Ghz Xeon!!!) and OS X is rock solid.

osxisfun · Dec 5, 2003, 06:35 PM

wise the G5's are obliterating anything we have seen coming from the x86 side of the fence (we are using XLF and XLC! and probably hitting near double real world perf if not significantly higher that what we get from 2Ghz opteron and present 3Ghz Xeon!!!) and OS X is rock solid.

nice

travism · Dec 5, 2003, 06:59 PM

yeah, i may hold out, but from what my apple programmer friend says...release and shipping dates are very different. plus i'm not the type that can wait a month for the thing to arrive. who knows, i may wait it out though.

i've used apt-get and gentoo's portage (bsd like ports system) before and have heard of fink. you gotta love things that solve deps smartly.

the types of files i'd be moving would be media (mp3, avi, asf, wmv, mov, mpg...etc) and documents in doc format, rtf format and OpenOffice.org's format (OO has an OS X port) as well as images and other junk. i figure if Linux can handle those files surely OS X can. (correct me if i'm wrong). i figure using smb would be the best way to move the data b/c afaik OS X can't read the ext3 linux filesystem.

I love the fact that when I join the ADC i'll get 20% off my purchase. that sold me.

travis

Landos Mustache · Dec 5, 2003, 07:41 PM

Originally posted by travism:

the types of files i'd be moving would be media (mp3, avi, asf, wmv, mov, mpg...etc) and documents in doc format, rtf format and OpenOffice.org's format (OO has an OS X port) as well as images and other junk.

These formats you will have no problem with at all: mp3, mov, mpg, doc, rtf.

Just move them on over and they will work normally.

Lateralus · Dec 5, 2003, 08:01 PM

Originally posted by travism:
yeah, i may hold out, but from what my apple programmer friend says...release and shipping dates are very different. plus i'm not the type that can wait a month for the thing to arrive. who knows, i may wait it out though.

In that case, you could snag a current machine on blow out immediately. Save hundreds of dollars, and not have to wait at all.

And congratulations on the switch. I came over to the Mac side in 2002 from Windows 2000 and BeOS.

kupan787 · 08:58 PM

Originally posted by travism:
the types of files i'd be moving would be media (mp3, avi, asf, wmv, mov, mpg...etc) and documents in doc format, rtf format and OpenOffice.org's format (OO has an OS X port) as well as images and other junk. i figure if Linux can handle those files surely OS X can. (correct me if i'm wrong). i figure using smb would be the best way to move the data b/c afaik OS X can't read the ext3 linux filesystem.

The OS X port of OO still requires X11, but that is "integrated" into Panther, so no real worries.

As far as ext3, I remember reading about a driver for OS X over at resexcellence, but can't seem to find the article now...

[EDIT] Ok, I found some info on ext3.

ext3 is backwards compatible with ext2. So using this, you should be able to read and possibly write to ext3 volumes. However, the advanced journaling features of ext3 won't function with this driver. but since you are only grabbing files of the drive, you are all set.

Hydra · Dec 5, 2003, 08:55 PM

I'm the last one to want to wait for a new machine ( I ordered my dual G5 right after the Macworld keynote address and got one of the first ones in September) but if you say you're gonna wait a month or so and that falls w/in the range of a potential MacWorld announcement, why not wait and see what happens. At the very least if a new speed bump is announced and unreleased til a month or 2 later then the current systems may be able to be had at discount.

-Jerry C.

Eug · Dec 5, 2003, 08:56 PM

Just a note: Refurb dual 2.0s are the same price as normal dual 1.8s.

Originally posted by osxisfun:
wise the G5's are obliterating anything we have seen coming from the x86 side of the fence (we are using XLF and XLC! and probably hitting near double real world perf if not significantly higher that what we get from 2Ghz opteron and present 3Ghz Xeon!!!) and OS X is rock solid.

What type of code?

Link · Dec 5, 2003, 09:51 PM

You'll probably love it. OSX has a great GUI and is similar to openBSD without all the hard work customizing it

I run IRC servers off my g4 happily :shrug: and just about anything else, the bauty though is I can turn around and play a few nice games that don't exist on linux soo yeah

travism · Dec 6, 2003, 04:52 PM

well, it will be after macworld before i buy the G5 just because i won't have the money till then. it will be nice to have a computer with a Unix os that "just works" no more fiddling with kernel options or spending weeks reading material just to give up on whatever i was researching. it will be sweet.

thanks for the info

travis