Primary Machine: Laptop or Desktop?
Received the MacBook Pro yesterday, and have had no hardware problems whatsoever. I do have a question, one I didn't think much about it when ordering: for people with a laptop AND a desktop machine, how are you handling which is the "primary" and which isn't? Where are all your files? Where do you keep your gigs of music (for me, having over 100 gigs of music, they'd have to remain on the desktop, but then I get all fashimmered about how I can't set ratings or increment playcounts from an iTunes share)? Do you keep everything on one machine, and work on the shared files when you're local to the network? Do you rsync back and forth? What if you don't have .Mac and thus can't use iSync? Are all your work files on the laptop, as logic would dictate they'd have to be when you're at a remote location? Do you ever care about syncing them back to the desktop machine? When you're home and you wake up in the morning to check your email, which machine do you go to? Do you have a desk for your laptop?
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Yeah, well, uh... I just built a AMD X2 4800+ system with a Geforce7800GTX... And stuff...
Prick.
Just seeing if you were still around, you're still on my buddy list. (Afext, remember, that crazy kid who wrote in to VD on occasion.) Good to see that Disobey is still kicking. Will always be an awesome domain name.
Been a long time, but yep, I'za remember you. :)
I have a server which sits at home, i've mapped a drive to the server where itunes saves all its xml gubbins. so my laptop and desktop both share the same files on the server... don't really save much to the actual "client" machine.
When i'm away from the network i have vpn access to server. but don't really use it much.
OK, this is all a little academical for me at the moment, as my laptop has a whopping crack in the screen, so its not used much. I have a mess of machines and OSes. I used to use Windows on both machines, and have kept this chigging blue mess on each machine for only ONE reason per machine: my laptop needs to run Ableton Live and desktop needs to run, of course, games.
So, I end up with a mess of four OS installs, three OSes (Windows XP, Kubuntu (laptop) and Archlinux (desktop)). Each machine has basically three partitions - Linux, Windows and Data. Synching is a major pain in the ass, and these are far from perfect, but here's how I've got things:
I'm tempted to get myself a decent, solid 200Gb external drive for data, eliminating numbers 3 & 4. I could also take a look at rsyncing my two data drives, but thats dropped down the todo list a little recently.
So nothing special here. No wizardry tips for the bearded one. Perhaps someone else could share some light for the both of us.
Laptop for communication-related activities. Email. Chat. Browser. Also for media-related activities. iTunes. iPhoto. Garage Band. Podcast recording.
Desktop at work for work-related PHP development, and test server for work (website dev).
Desktop at home for personal development, but, in reality, I hardly ever use it, as in sit in front of it. I use it remotely a lot. It acts as a server for some things. Like X-10, test web stuff.
Until a few weeks ago I had a fairly clean split between (Win2k) laptop for comms, writing and the like; (Debian) desktop for 'serious' work, biggish monitor, as well as having a fairly big drive in there as a dump for all data. But the laptop hasn't been portable for a long while (dead battery), so I just got an iBook. Not sure how this will pan out, I've already found myself coding on the laptop (because it's comfy on the settee in front of the fire). Data transfer is a bit disorganised - I was using Samba but I haven't got the Mac to see it yet, so I've been using rsync there. Two aspects of the setup that seem to work are having the big drive on the desktop, and only having one OS per machine - I used to multi-boot, regularly got confused. Having a Wiki running on the local server is handy for quick copy/pastes across machines and notetaking. Photos are on the wife's (WinXP) machine - must backup *soon*.
Hmmm. I tossed my desktop machine a year ago and have never looked back. I went to Hypersonic and got a custom machine built, and yes, it was quite a bit more expensive than the laptop you purchased, like double and then some, but circumstances allowed me to do so. Only down side - since I opted to not go with the mobile processor for obvious reasons, the battery life isn't worth squat. But I can always find an outlet. Also, for data storage, I have a server that I back up to as well as a dual layer burner. I don't have near as much music as you all. My back ups are a scant couple of gig.
Most people use desktop as primary machine and laptop -as it is also named-; "notebook", as the add-on. It's often (laptop) less powerful, has less capacity, could be lost, broken, or accessed easily by unauthorized persons wherever you leave it. To solve that confusion you fall in, try to set specific usage for this and that, do not use both for same purposes unless you emergently need so. Do no keep your critical files on your laptop, move any important data you get to your desktop continually, avoid vice versa.
I use laptops (Macbook Pro or IBM T42) as my primary computers and I have a OpenBSD server (wishing it was FreeBSD) which resides on a static IP address. Ocassionally I'll use the server for file storage and use SFTP for file transfers. The server hosts my web site, e-mail and Tiny Proxy over SSH.
OSX is my primary operating system. Music is stored on my iPod (considering archiving your crap music). I use Mail.app for e-mail reading and use IMAPS with SMTP + SSL SASL auth.
I'm using psync (rsync doesn't handle resource forks) and ghost with an enternal Maxtor hard drive (multiple partitions) for backups.
Wants:
- PGP for ICBM, although GnuPG would probably also do the job.
- VirtualPC with Intel VT support, although Q should have this soon.
- Macbook Pro Keyboard + mouse drivers for WinXP
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