Running Macbuntu on Ubuntu 10.10

I was having a chat to some people on Friday on why some devices were successful and some were… not.

Essentially what it came down to was the user experience and, while the hardware plays a part in this experience, the interface was the major driver of intuitive and efficient use.

To that end, I decided to have a bit of fun with some fan boys and, over the weekend I installed a Mac theme/overlay for Ubuntu called ‘Macbuntu‘

It’s a surprisingly simple process, for Ubuntu 10.10 users it’s 4 simple lines in terminal as follows (thanks Lifehacker):

wget https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/macbuntu/macbuntu-10.10/v2.3/Macbuntu-10.10.tar.gz -O /tmp/Macbuntu-10.10.tar.gz
tar xzvf /tmp/Macbuntu-10.10.tar.gz -C /tmp
cd /tmp/Macbuntu-10.10/
./install.sh

Choosing the default options all the way through will leave you (after a reboot) with a desktop which is fairly close to that of Mac OSX.

On my EEE netbook the eye candy costs me ~20% more CPU but it served its purpose today when I put it in front of a couple of Steve Jobs diciples and saw them bug out that an open OS could indeed deliver an experience close to that of their beloved Macs.