Monzool’s Personal Publishing

LIBERATED AT LAST. No more torment and self-punishment of using Mac OS X. I finally caved and wiped the Apple operating system from my Macbook and installed Debian and KDE 4. Sweet.

For a long time I’ve been reluctant to wipe the Mac OS X. I wouldn’t just give up on Mac OS X that easy. If so many people finds it that great, why did I keep hitting shortcoming after shortcoming and stupidity after stupidity?

If I should list what I like about the Mac OS X, I could list three things: Front-row is a pretty good media center. Mac OS X boots really fast. I like the zebra wallpaper - I kept that.

As for reasons that I don’t like the Mac OS X experience I could list a few. For example: Finder sux bad and is slow as molasses and stupid. The terminal is broken. I hate when CD’s won’t eject. Its frustrating that wireless cannot reconnect after standby. Hate those stupid obscure keyboard shortcuts. Feel back at Window 2000 with software updates that requires rebooting. I loathe those giant updates to iTunes which I rarely used. The multi-workspace concept in Spaces, its borked. The hibernation support is lousy at best. Hate that stupid inefficient application task switcher. And not by fault of Apple, I’m unhappy with the endless row of bad Total Commander/Krusader clones. I’m also irritated on an almost endless row of broken macports and broken fink ports.

It actually required two attempts to get the Macbook up and running. On the first attempt I followed the directions from the Debian Macbook Wiki, which preach that Lilo must be install for a later replacement by Grub. After installing Grub it was no longer possible to boot. On the second attempt I installed Debian like normal, and chose Grub as boot manager. Then it worked. Actually in a few other occasions I got into troubles when following the guides. It seems that the Debian Macbook Wiki is somewhat outdated on certain areas, as some special “jumping though loops” measures are no longer required, but would rather get you into trouble. Installing the 915resolutions package for example, crashed my X, but was in fact not necessary to get the prober resolution anyways. However it provides many valuable informations and links, and generally ease the installation considerable.

HAVING GROWN UP using Norton Commander for DOS, Total Commander on Windows and Midnight Commander and Krusader on Linux, its hard, if not impossible, to do work without a proper Norton Commander clone. This is true, especially on Mac OS. The standard file tools in Mac OS X are useless compared to the mentioned tools. For Mac OS X a range of native alternatives exists like Disk Order, XFolders, Fork Lift and muCommander. None of them are really good though. They all have their own weirdness’ and shortcomings, and generally none comes near the functionality and speed of used offered by Krusader or Total Commander.

I’ve used Midnight commander on Mac OS X, but I prefer Krusader, and thankfully its pretty easy to get Krusader up and running on Mac OS X thanks to the Fink project. If not having installed Fink already, do so by performing the following steps after downloading the source distribution (a binary installer is provided for Mac OS X Tiger).

$ tar xvf fink-0.28.1.tar
$ cd fink-0.28.1
$ ./bootstrap
$ /sw/bin/pathsetup.sh
$ source ./init.sh
$ fink selfupdate

Fink is now installed, configured, updated and ready for use. Installing Krusader and the required dependencies takes only a single command.

$ sudo fink install krusader

Wait for compilation to complete (may take a while). If everything goes well, Krusader should be able to be started from the terminal window.

$ krusader &

Running Krusader I discovered that the Meta/Alt key was not possible to use. This is unfortunate as many keyboard shortcuts in Krusader uses that key. Fixing this requires two setup modifications. In the X11 preferences I deselected all options under the tab ‘input’. This makes sure that X11 won’t override any personal settings made on the keyboard setup. Alas this is exactly what is required for the Meta/Alt key to work. Terminate the X11 session and edit the file ~/.Xmodmap (create it if not existing). Add the following keyboard mappings.

clear Mod1
keycode 66 = Meta_L
add Mod1 = Meta_L
keycode 69 = Mode_switch
add Mod1 = Mode_switch

Now Krusader can be used with working keyboard shortcuts :-) (note that my MacBook has a Danish keyboard, so the above mappings may possible be different if using another keyboard layout).