Re: ot - laptop for dba

From: De DBA <dedba_at_tpg.com.au>
Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2010 13:45:03 +1000
Message-ID: <4C05D3BF.4070903_at_tpg.com.au>

For what it's worth, I've got a Macbook Pro as well and I'm quite happy with it. Best laptop I ever had :) Of course mine is company-provided so the price is not an issue and I got VMWare Fusion and Windows 7 provided with it. Having said that, the boss did say that the price here in Brissy was the same as for a comparable laptop running Windows.

I am most happy about the fact that I can run up two VMS (Debian, Windows 7), 2 databases (one Mac, one Linux) and still have some performance on the oracle client in the Windows VM :) Don't see though why you should have to run anything from an external drive?

As to freeware/shareware that runs on the PC - my PC has Linux and all software (or most anyway) that runs on that is available through Macports or will compile on Darwin with minimal effort. My MAcbook came with Developer (on CD) which amongst others has gcc. TOra (TOAD like oracle tool) is also available for the Mac. I only use the windows VM to test compatibilities and for some VPNs, as there's nothing else that I need that does not seem to run on the Mac.

It is true that documentation on the Darwin OS is difficult to find, but google is your friend here ;) Of course there is a root user: it is a BSD UNIX distribution after all. The root user is not advertised, but as in Ubuntu, the main user of the laptop is automatically added to the sudo group. So 'sudo su -' in the terminal.app gives you root, as per usual.

The only thing that I don't like much is Finder.. it hides most of the filesystem. Bit of a misnomer, I reckon..

Cheers,
Tony

On 2/06/10 1:00 AM, Dba DBA wrote:
> I have a macbook pro. I am not all that impressed with it relative to
> the high price.

...
> One other annoying this, is that macintosh uses a highly adapted version
> of unix. It is NOT well documented at all. Apple purposely does not
> document alot about the macintosh that is not GUI related. For example,
> there is no root user.

...<snip>

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l

Received on Tue Jun 01 2010 - 22:45:03 CDT