Mac desktop upgrade time

I think it is taken as gospel that Apple products are expensive, perhaps even considered over-priced by some. This may well be true on some of their more fanboy, consumer orientated products but when recently looking at options for a desktop replacement it seems that Apple is giving better value for money than you might have thought.

Hopefully, I’ll soon be using a MacPro as my desktop, yup, that is 8 cores. On my desktop. Certainly far more powerful than a large number of servers that I have ran Oracle on. Oh and did I mention the 4GB of RAM? Don’t forget the 1TB of storage either . That should give me enough oomph to run a couple of vm’s with Oracle DB’s in them, so I wont miss the fact that Oracle have yet (oh aye, don’t hold yer breath) to release 11g for MacOS. My current desktop is an old PowerMac G5 which runs PowerPC so no parallels running on that!

The real point of this posting is that if you think Apple is expensive, then think again. The MacPro rig I specced up came in around £600 cheaper than a similar IBM machine. I say similar but what I really mean is that you get a whole load less for your extra 600 quid. IBM will give you 4 less cores, memory that runs marginally slower and a whole dollop less of storage! It’s pretty much the same story when we looked to Dell, and as for HP, well their uk website is so crumby you can’t even find the price of a user configurable rig.

My Colleagues can hardly believe it. A number of Linux users are going to be jumping on the Apple bandwagon, ok, they are keen on using the Apple hardware to run Linux, so they have not become truly enlightened. Still think Apple is overpriced? If you are in the market for a new desktop take a look, you might be surprised yourself.

It’s pure coincidence that this post is during macworld expo, but I suppose I can’t get away without mentioning what was in the air at the moscone center, where the stevenote revealed the worlds thinnest notebook. I think even the most die hard apple skeptic has to concede that apple design is streets ahead of its rivals. I think the air looks fantastic, and makes my MacBook Pro look a bit boxy (mind you I’m not sure I could live with less than my 15″ screen real estate!)

Over the past few years since the iPod basically owned the mp3 player market, it seems to have been an amazing run of success in terms of product releases. Apple are not content to have products that just ape other products, they are definately technological leaders rather than followers, e.g. iPhone was nothing like any other phone and probably has set the UI standard for mobiles, and yeah I’ve seen the LG Viewty and trust me the UI is a pale imitation. The air is the same, it’s not just another small laptop, it had to be thinner than every laptop!

So I like apple products, and hey they even run UNIX.

Finally running 11g on a Mac

I know i’m not the fastest blogger on the block, but finally I have a running 11.1.0.6 database. Partly it’s taken so long due to the fact Oracle tend not release on MacOS, so I’ve had to go the parallels route:

Mostly the install was idiot proof, except with upgrading to Leopard, you have to be on the latest Parallels version 3.0, and the latest build 5160. Of course, I was on 2.X which unfortunately is not a free upgrade to version 3.X.

I went for Ubuntu in the end, partly because it seems to be increasingly the Linux desktop variant of choice these days, but mostly due to the size of the download, which at 700MB compares very favourably to the mutli-Gigabyte offering from Oracle Enterprise Linux. Of course the Linux user experience still has not quite reached consumer level, OK so this might be a Parallels issue rather than Ubuntu, but somehow i’m still annoyed with having to install Linux to play with 11g, so I’m blaming them. Essentially the display kept crashing during the install and I had to hack the /etc/X11/xorg.conf details are available on the parallels forum and Shane Duffy. Once the advice there was done, Ubuntu + Parallels seems stable and quite performant on my MacBook Pro. In particular, I love how you can run parallels in full screen in one space and still use the hot-keys to get to another space. Oh I had to do some network fiddling to allow the vm to see the outside world, after fiddling with the network gui, I ran /sbin/dhclient to pick up a dhcp address.

So now I had a working Linux version it was time to get jiggy with 11g, so perhaps the best place of information about installing on Ubuntu is Howard J. Rogers, in particular his script for setting up Ubuntu just the right way for an Oracle install is priceless and saves you the hassle of setting, for example, the shared memory parameters, or indeed the hassle of creating the oracle user. Unfortunately, my Ubuntu install was still not quite right after running the script. I was missing /usr/include/sys/types.h and the first attempt at install bombed out on this. You can find this in the libc6-dev package. Next up was the issue that my /etc/apt/sources.list file had been edited to only look on the install cdrom (I guess due to lack of networking during the install), so if you have a good sources.list you, unlike me will pick up libaio.so.1 (which funnily enough comes from the libaio1 package). The install after this really is easy, lots of things in the Oracle installer bitch about not finding things, but as Howard says, you can safely ignore them and 11g will install happily on Ubuntu.

So now I can play with 11g like any self respecting blogger!

Some thoughts on Leopard

I’m not really a fully paid up apple fanboy, though you would have to prise my Macbook Pro from my cold dead hands. I have now installed Leopard, aka Mac OS X 10.5 on both my PowerPC based desktop and my intel based laptop. Both upgrades were a doddle really, and I would say I was pleasantly surprised that all 3rd party apps seem to be functioning as normal. I have heard reports of some issues for some people in the Nominet HQ. Also it seems like if you have partitioned your hard drive with the boot camp beta you may not be able to do an upgrade, but only a wipe and install.

I have to say though Leopard really is only an incremental improvement on Tiger, I’m quite liking the spaces, but I already had this functionality on my desktop thanks to codetek vritual desktop. I’m not convinced by cover flow in finder, it seems to take longer to find things with this.

For me the killer app is time machine, being a dba backups are close to my heart, but imagine my disappointment when I realised it was not going to play ball with filevault. So, really not all that worth the £85 for an upgrade, but boy am I glad I don’t use Vista!

Remote Buddy

One thing I forgot to mention when discussing falling of the stage at the Oracle User Group Scotland event was what actually caused me to fall. The reason behind the fall, was that I was using my MacBook Pro’s remote to control my power point presentation, unfortunately while I was explaining a diagram on the other end of the screen the angle to the laptop was preventing changing slides so I moved over for a better angle.

I was using Remote Buddy to help control powerpoint and I have been well impressed at how easily it works, there was zero configuration to perform, just download, install and get clicking. By the way Remote Buddy can drive a whole slew of applications not just powerpoint so if you need to control an application from a distance, check it out.