Land of DTrace

September 6th, 2007

I deleted the Ubuntu partition that I had. Now I’m using Solaris. It’s much nicer to use, except for the fonts. I don’t think I can work on Mozilla without DTrace ever again. Too useful.

Good lord, someone please fix the fonts, on every OS ever.

I have a MacBook Pro that runs OS X and Windows, and I prefer OS X to most things, but I loathe the hardware. I burned myself today. I think I’ll switch to a plastic laptop that will run Linux for portable things. What laptop works well with Ubuntu, has a 15 inch screen, and gets good battery life on wifi? I can compromise on the Ubuntu part, but it must run Linux.

Posted by rsayre Filed in Uncategorized
13 Comments »

13 Responses to “Land of DTrace”

  1. Ritchie Says:
    September 6th, 2007 at 11:38 pm

    Hi Rob,

    Before quitting on the MBP and buying an ugly plastic laptop, give a try to SMCFanControl.

    You’ll be able to tweak the speed of the fans, and yopu’ll be able to work hours with the laptop on your lap !!!

  2. Asbjørn Ulsberg Says:
    September 6th, 2007 at 11:58 pm

    Perhaps http://www.linux-laptop.net/ can be of help?

  3. Robert Accettura Says:
    September 7th, 2007 at 4:48 am

    I’d suggest a Thinkpad T series. Just check which wireless card you choose (normally a choice between an Intel and Atheros chipset). I have a 15″ T43 with an Intel Wireless card and it does work fine with an Ubuntu Live CD.

  4. Wil Clouser Says:
    September 7th, 2007 at 9:23 am

    I think the IBM laptops are your best bet. They’re tough, have awesome battery life, and they run linux well. Check out thinkwiki.org if you have specific questions about a model.

  5. Michael Burns Says:
    September 7th, 2007 at 9:47 am

    Thinkpad T series. Great machines. They are in the T6x series these days.

  6. Bob Aman Says:
    September 7th, 2007 at 1:26 pm

    And if the fan control isn’t your cup of tea, I highly recommend the laptop board option. If nothing else, it lets you easily use a mouse with a laptop even when you’re sitting on the couch.

  7. Yusuf Says:
    September 7th, 2007 at 8:01 pm

    Dtrace will be standard in Mac OSX 10.5 with supposedly bindings available for perl,ruby,python,java

  8. dave Says:
    September 9th, 2007 at 7:35 am

    You talk about two different things in your post and you don’t explicityl link them so I’m wondering if you’re aware that DTrace is included in the new version of Mac OS X with a fancy GUI:

    http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/developer/xray.html

  9. stephen o'grady Says:
    September 9th, 2007 at 5:40 pm

    can’t speak to the 15 inch models, but the 12 inch X40 works perfectly out of the box with Ubuntu. suspend, the Thinkpad keys, bluetooth, wifi, everything. i’ve even got a Sierra Wireless HSDPA card running on it perfectly.

    the X60s, on the other hand, does not work similarly well. suspend is flaky, and the madwifi drivers for the Atheros card were not nearly as solid as the Intel IPW 2200’s.

  10. tecosystems » links for 2007-09-10 Says:
    September 9th, 2007 at 9:25 pm

    [...] Rob Sayre’s Mozilla Blog » Blog Archive » Land of DTrace “I deleted the Ubuntu partition that I had. Now I’m using Solaris. It’s much nicer to use, except for the fonts. I don’t think I can work on Mozilla without DTrace ever again. Too useful.” – the DTrace demo w/ Spidermonkey is really impressive (tags: dtrace opensolaris opensource solaris mozilla robertsayre osx) [...]

  11. Peter Says:
    September 10th, 2007 at 3:01 am

    Hi Rob,

    Check out the Thinkpad series. I’ve run Linux on Toshiba, IBM and Dell laptops over the years, the IBM usually had better support & stability, before you buy, check out other people’s experiences.

    Check out the http://www.vgcomputing.com.au website, for linux compatibility I’ve purchased computers from this fellow in the past, well worth the visit.

    You might even consider running Solaris on a laptop, if you do, make sure the one you get is certified http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/search.jsp also investigate sound and video driver support (make sure you get the nvidia video card). Note that you’ll need to download components from opensolaris to get acpi support, check out other peoples experiences and ask on the opensolaris website if interested. Solaris is generally not as well supported as Linux on a laptop. Although you can set up a linux zone and run all your linux apps too.

  12. Marc Says:
    September 10th, 2007 at 7:43 am

    You probably still need to recompile freetype on solaris to enable the legally-troublesome hinting options.

  13. Myk Melez Says:
    September 10th, 2007 at 3:50 pm

    If I didn’t have to test stuff on Mac OS X sometimes, I’d still have my trusty ThinkPad T42 (or have replaced it with a newer ThinkPad).