Working in Ubuntu, and my last post that I made, got me wondering how development of Leopard was going on my particular laptop model. Come to find out, some of the bugs (ie. the dragon breath from the vents in the laptop) were fixed. Since I already had all of my media and documents on an external hard drive, I created a third partition (well, fourth if you count the Linux swap partition) and gave it a go again. Following very specific installation instructions, I successfully booted into a working version of Leopard, sans the the stovetop/keyboard. I killed Vista and, slightly sadly, Ubuntu to clear the whole hard drive for Leopard. Now, it's not to say I'm without issues; as I always had to before, I have to boot with the DVD in the drive. I'm not sure what I've always done wrong in that regard, but it's a non-issue in my book since I'm so used to it. I also had no wifi, which meant piggybacking off my wife's PowerBook through ethernet. Of course, this cut both of our connection speeds, so I worked diligently today to restore wifi.
Try as I might, I could find nothing on how to fix my particular model's wifi. It was supposed to work "out of the box", but for some reason, it wasn't for me, nor the person who I copied the install instructions from (we did install all available networking options, so it wasn't for lack of trying). I eventually broadened my search to look for similar wifi chips and how to enable those. Still nothing useful. I eventually pieced together enough parts of the puzzle to realize that a driver within a driver was missing. The only way to get that was to download a huge system update file from Apple, crack it open, and individually install just that single file. After rebooting, I was up and running on wireless. It felt good to troubleshoot and solve a problem on my own (though it was an afternoon full of trial and error). Frustrating as it was, it was pretty damn cool to fix a problem that hadn't been specifically fixed before.
So I'm back in Leopard, where I'm completely comfortable, with the programs that I love. While not as extensive as Vista, or as customizable as Ubuntu, Leopard is fast, reliable, and does exactly what I want it to do. Call me an OS Switcher, but barring any unforseen future mega-issues, I'm going to stick with OS X on my PC laptop. Yes, I have a Zune, and that won't work with Mac OS X, but I do own a license for VMWare Fusion and I have a full copy of XP Pro laying around gathering dust. And that'll be my Zune solution. With PocketMac for my BlackBerry, I'm all set!
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