The Grand Windows Laptop Experiment

2016-12-07 19:28:09 by jdixon

If you follow me on Twitter, you might remember my rants (well, among many other people) regarding their new 2016 MacBook Pro line of laptops. There've been an abundance of reviews online, criticizing Apple for their "courage" to remove ports and functional keys that are still a mainstay in most users' workflows, and for actual performance regressions in most real-world scenarios. I think these changes reflect a desire by Apple to cater to their larger mass consumer audience, while at the same time streamlining a Mac product line facing an eroding market due to our increasingly mobile-first world.

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Flying Cars and Food Capsules

2011-05-25 21:02:52 by jdixon

Today I was installing RHEL 6.0 on a remote Xen domU using virt-install with VNC. None of the Mac VNC clients I tried was able to render anything remotely usable. I tried various encoding schemes and color resolutions, to no avail. And where Chicken of the VNC rendered a screen seemingly inspired by LSD trips, RealVNC simply shit its pants and crashed.

So I downloaded an OpenBSD 4.9 iso and installed it in VMware Fusion. Installed tightvnc-viewer from packages. And in less than 10 minutes, I had a working X11-over-SSH tunnel to the remote Xen VNC console. From my Mac desktop. Through an OpenBSD VM. Across the fucking internet.

Welcome to the future. Sorta.