Helm's Technology Blog

A few weeks ago I upgraded ubuntu to Gutsy Gibbon – I was very impressed, the enhanced graphics which were not available to me in feisty now worked.

However somehow last week I lost my title bar, so no window title, no minimise or maximise button and the close button was gone. In addition the terminal window was now broken loading up a blank page.

After trawling through various forums and trying half a dozen fixes, with no success I finally tried turning off the special effects, and now have them back.

It’s a bit frustrating, I can only assume that one of the regular updates broke the driver that was working for me previously as no settings had been changed. Ah well – anyone with this problem, it’s really not worth the hassle just to have windows that wobble when moved and desktops that slide when changed

Ok – I use 3 distinctly different operating systems routinely.

I have windows XP – this is on my laptop and also have a copy on my desktop – though this rarely runs it now.

I have ubuntu (kubuntu) on my desktop – this is nearly always on and is great.

I then have a Mac in the office at work – running Mac OS X.

generally apart from keyboard issues (as i don’t have a Mac Keyboard so sometimes the mappings go wonky) – the Mac is fine – no probs, but in order to access SSH the Mac just doesn’t have anything to touch Putty.

Putty is a very well known and very popular SSH client – I’ve been using it since around 2003 – maybe earlier.  It exists for windows and this appears to be where it is primarily developed for – and it’s great – never seen a better SSH client – does what’s needed – nice and clean, lets you save session data etc…

It exists for Linux – so I have in it my ubuntu install – don’t recall how I got it – but it’s pretty much like the windows client – few little quirks but it’s putty and i can use it.
But when it comes to the Mac – I’ve hunted – searched – tried someones build – didn’t work – got the source – can’t compile it!  Why does no real equivalent of Putty exist  - theres a few that pretend to be – buth when you are administrating multiple servers they just don’t quite cut it!

The problem is it’s not just Putty – theres a handful of programs that seem to be available on “free” operating systems like ubuntu which help people who have come from windows – and who – to be honest – like to use a graphical interface sometimes – which just aren’t available on the Mac – I am sure this works the other way – problem is the Apple want the Mac to be more mainstream and whilst they are making progress – it’s just not there yet…

P.s. I am sure I will rant about how useless windows is – and ubuntu at some point – in fact I feel a Ubuntu rant coming along soon…..