My Shiny New Macbook
posted 2012-27-04 03:59:00 -0500
There I was, doing an Android job for NOVX Systems in Richmond Hill, Ontario, trying desperately to make Eclipse fit in my netbook’s 2GB of RAM when it hit me: I needed a new one. I searched far and wide for a 10.1” or 11” netbook with 4GB of DDR3 RAM and an i5 processor and discovered, much to my surprise, that there could be only one…the Apple MacBook Air :( If you’ve ever spent more than an hour with me, you know that I am not Apple’s biggest fan. But I needed the hardware, so I swallowed my pride and got the damned thing.
But For My Sanity
It took me nearly a day to get OSX off of it completely (I managed to preserve the recovery partition on a USB key in case I ever felt like selling it), and Ubuntu 12.04 booting via EFI (i.e. without rEfit). I have to say, it works beautifully and boots in under 10 seconds with as much silky smoothness as OSX does! But each time I closed the lid, that infernal Apple was staring me in the face. So I designed a custom Ubuntu decal based on the “Circle of Friends” logo and had some lovely New Zealanders print it out for me. The fruits of my labour are above. And they say money can’t buy you love…
You can download the EPS I created for the decal here. The black matches the trimming and keyboard of the Air perfectly, and it’s just big enough to fully conceal the Apple logo (a priority), while allowing the backlight to illuminate the circle of friends :D
