Matthew's Journal

Back in December 2007, I installed linux on my Mac Pro (my work desktop machine), following the instructions on http://wiki.debian.org/DebianOnIntelMacPro (some of which I edited in the light of my experience). 18 months later, I'm spending an increasing proportion of my time at work running linux rather than OSX. Mainly this is because Debian has a sensible 64-bit toolchain, something that Apple still haven't managed to get right. Also, fink is a hacky mess, whereas Debian's amd64 distribution works Just Fine.

There are some flies in the ointment, though. The mactel-linux patches aren't in the mainstream kernel, so there's a certain amount of faff involved in building a kernel; I've not made audio work as yet, but I've not tried very hard (it is a work machine, after all ;-). The biggest down-side, by a country mile, however, is firefox. It's dreadful. Every so often (sometimes more than once a minute), it'll just start chewing 100% of one of my CPUs, even if I've not looked at a web-page for a while. Talking to people on #chiark, it seems I'm far from alone in having these random cpu-chewing incidents. I do wish there were a decent Free graphical web browser.