Grammerjack

My kids' favorite piece of educational software is " Clifford The Big Red Dog Thinking Adventures " by Scholastic. We received it as a hand-me-down from their cousins. The CD was designed for Windows 95-98 and pre-OSX Macintosh. Unfortunately, it does not run on OS X 10.6. (I think it fails to run because it uses the PowerPC instruction set and Apple dropped support for emulating that instruction set in 10.6.) After some trial and error, I found the most reliable way to run Clifford on my Mac was: Install VMWare Fusion . Install Ubuntu 10.10 32-bit in a Virtual Machine. Install the VMWare Additions to make Ubuntu work better in the VM. Install Wine on Ubuntu 10.10 . (Wine provides partial Windows API emulation for Linux.) Configure the audio for Wine. (I accepted the defaults.) Insert the Clifford CD and manually run the installer. The result is that the Clifford game runs full screen with smooth animation and audio, even on my lowly first-generation Intel Mac Mi...

Android system-level development can be done on either Linux or OSX. For the past few years I've been using OSX, but recently I've switched over to using Linux. Why? Mostly for the higher performance. The full Android system build takes about 30% less time under Ubuntu 8.04 LTS than it does on OSX 10.5 on the same hardware. Not to mention that it's much cheaper to buy a generic PC workstation than the equivalent Mac Pro. I have had some early troubles: It took me a while to get used to typing the "Ctrl" key instead of the "Command" key, and the ugly Linux fonts bothered me for a few days. But since I'm mostly using the exact same programs on Linux as I was on OSX (FireFox, Eclipse, Android), after a few days everything clicked, and I think that I'm just as productive as I was before. And the faster builds and file system stuff (like grep) are wonderful. It helped a lot to install the Blubuntu theme and some nice wallpaper to get away from the awf...