I started writing this post some months ago back in September but never got around to finishing it. At first this post was going to be me singing my praises for Ubuntu and how well Ubuntu supports the Macbook Pro. Unfortunately in that time I’ve now moved to Mac OS X…

I ran Ubuntu on my Macbook Pro seemlessly for just under 3 months before upgrading to Intrepid Ibex. The upgrade went smoothly, except for my office printer no longer working. This lead to Ubuntu’s demise on my MBP. After re-installing the driver 3 times I decided I’d remove CUPS in case there were left over configuration files causing issues. Unfortunately I stupidly marked all CUPS components with ‘remove completely’ via synaptic. I then watched synaptic systematically remove nearly all my system packages… nautilus, firefox, gnome, the lot. My bad.

After 3 days of recovering my data and failed attempts to re-install, and have my Macbook boot Ubuntu without live CD assistance, I gave up and installed Mac OS X. This in itself is no fault of Apple or Ubuntu. Apple never meant for Macbook’s to run Linux.

Two issues arose when I moved from Windows Vista running on Bootcamp to native Ubuntu.

1) Rewind to mid-August, after reading up on hardware compatibility, and how to put Ubuntu on my Macbook Pro, I wiped my Windows Vista and OSX partitions and installed Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy). That was a whole lot of fun – only realising Apple had crippled my “Superdrive” with a firmware update, I couldn’t read my Mac OSX Leopard DVD (I’m not the only one – £400+ for Apple to fix it, no thanks!) and only able to occasionally read the Ubuntu installation CD.

I managed to overcome these hurdles with a trusty 16GB Rally 2 USB stick and a WD Passport external USB hard drive. I even splashed out on an external DVD-RW to make future re-installs easier.

2) In early September I noticed when running on batteries my Macbook Pro would switch off after only 5 mins. No prompts about low battery, no shutdown sequence, nada. Just power off immediately. At the time I put this down to poor power management by Ubuntu. Just last night however (running OS X) it did exactly the same thing. So it looks like another hardware fault on my £1350 (with academic discount) laptop.

The firmware upgrade happened some months ago, possibly autumn 2007 but having no reason to use the DVD drive for months, I never noticed until I switched operating systems. The instant-power-off-issue-with-no-warming issue has only manifested since August. Co-incidentally just as my 1 yr of Apple Care expired.

So despite it’s low profile form factor and decent performance, I vow never to purchase another Macbook again. It’s a regular PC laptop for me next time…

Well so much for getting a Sony Viao. I bit the bullet and bought a new Santa Rosa 15″ Macbook Pro in the end. After a patient 18 day wait between ordering and delivery it finally arrived last Friday.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m no fan of OSX so I also picked up a copy of Windows Vista. For the 48 hours I’ve used Vista it doesn’t seem to be too different. It does feel like there’s now an additional click to get everywhere, a lot of things have been moved around (but in a methodical manner).

A lot of the nerdy stuff has been hidden, Add Hardware is not an easy spot unless you switch to classic view in Control Panel. Simple things like disk defragmenter now has no graphic display on it’s fragmentation. It feels as though MS has swept this stuff under the rug so the focus on productivity instead of maintaining the OS, which is fine but I imagine for “Power Users” this is annoying.

I digress, what I wanted to mention in this post was an issue I’ve had with Vista’s User Account Control (UAC) and running Eclipse. Each time I started Eclipse, Vista would prompt me with a “Open File – Security Warning”, informing me the program I am executing has an Unknown Publisher. Despite unchecking the ‘Always ask me about running this file’ option, it would repeatedly do so.

(eclipsec.exe pictured)

After some Googling I thought I’d found an answer. Check file properties, at the bottom of the General tab, click the Unblock button. No joy. Once I’d clicked OK, if I returned to the properties screen the file was blocked again. It turns out the problem was downloading Eclipse using IE7 and NTFS’ ’streams’.

I tried the suggestion of running Sysinteral’s streams and deleting the stream information but I encountered an ‘Access is denied’ message as well. Copying eclipse.exe from my system drive to my USB flash drive and then copying it back again sorted the issue.