Howto: make a macbook pro wheeze and sneeze

Got one. 2GHZ/2GB/100GB. Like Sylvain and many others. I was planning to hold out for a few more months but with a lot of travel going on and a project that needs 1.2+ GB RAM to do any kind of refactoring in IntelliJ, it just wasn't an option.

my latex environment doesn't work properly yet, it whines, it sneezes, lasts about half as long on a battery as my iBook did, is a lot heavier, doesn't fit in any of my bags, and gets as hot as Hale Berry.

But at least I can do serious work while on the road. Rosetta is positively amazing (I wouldn't have upgraded if it wasn't), and the even more amazing parallels is finally giving me back my vmware workstation workflow on the mac, with one new feature: I have a mac os x environment at the same time, too :-).

Which brings me to the subject of this post. If you want to drive your mac positively insane (and make it as noisy as your favorite lame cheap- ass wintel laptop), get yourself parallels, create a FreeBSD install, a RHEL install, and a winxp install. Concurrently, make the FreeBSD install compile xorg (portinstall xorg), make the RHEL install set up oracle (see oracle.com), and make the winxp install build the harmony class libraries (see harmony @ incubator). Its been running at 99% processor use for about an hour now.

It's taking some time, but I'm starting to like the machine. I suspect that, right now, it doesn't like me very much.