Win to Mac – Playing nicely with others (hardware)
As our long time Windows user (me) migrates from the PC to the Mac, we are documenting the progress in this series of columns.
Of course, when moving from Windows to OS X the new system hardware and the operating system are just the first challenges that have to be faced. There are others. The first of these is peripheral hardware compatibility. For me, at least, Linux has too often failed this test. OS X did much, much better. It liked my two printers, my scanner, my camera, my USB hard drive, my Firewire DVD burner, and my existing KVM switch. That was a nice surprise.
It is not, however, happy with my protected Linksys wireless network. From what I understand after looking around, this is a common problem with the current version of OS X. Whereas OS X may like most PC networks, it is not happy with some protected wireless networks (1). I got the MacBook Pro to connect once to mine, but then it would not do it again. It always timed out before the login handshaking completed.
For a while, I piggybacked on a neighbor’s unprotected Linksys wireless, with permission. When I am in my home office, I just connect with an ethernet cable. This is not a problem for everyone everywhere. It is a problem with some Macs and some protected wireless networks. I solved mine when I realized it might be a definitions problem. My PC wireless software wanted the entire pass-phrase. OS X just wanted the first generated key, but never said that. Problem solved.
Linux has similar problems with wireless. I am assuming that wireless networking is more difficult than I thought it was. Aside from setting it up, I have never worked with wireless networking, which is to say I have no detailed technical coding knowledge. My current network is a “g” and I need to upgrade to an “n” network anyway. I will probably just buy an Airport Extreme for a new router and replace all of my PC cards accordingly, which I would have had to do anyway. I will certainly do this if I can get one or more Airport users to tell me that this has worked for their PCs.
This does point out one more “negative” about Apple. They are not always extremely responsive to complaints of problems. From all that I can discover, their support personnel are often just as annoying and condescending as everyone else’s. Apple, like Microsoft, is very bad at acknowledging that operating system problems exist, or at communicating a desire to correct them. In the first sentence of this paragraph, I put the word negative in quotes. That is because, although it is certainly a negative, it is no more negative in regard to Apple as it is any other vendor. Saying that computer vendor support is lacking is exactly equivalent to saying that the sky is blue on nice days. There are a few bright spots, but too few.
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January 12th, 2009
Sounds like you’re having fun, it’s coming through in your writing.
One quick point for accuracy. Linux refers to the kernel. Various Distros add the UI, programs etc..I can run the same kernel on a PIII 64 meg PC or my latest hot damn gaming PC. If you have a problem with Ubuntu recognizing a wireless card, you could boot Fedora 10 and it’s found fine.
KDE, Gnome or Fluxbox GUI’s can all be chosen prior to log in and all run fine. The kernel is highly standardize. The strength of Linux is also on of the biggest drawbacks.
If I try to load wireless on Win95, or load an OSX PPC version on an Intel Macbook I could say Windows doesn’t run wireless or OSX doesn’t run on Macbooks. Gentoo Linux will make a newbie rip their hair out because it’s designed for gearheads and you need to compile a custom kernel. Ubuntu is sluggish because it tries have everything going in.
I could call OSX BSD, while technically true, it’s less than accurate.