Recently, I have been trying to get rid of my MacBook Pro so I will be able to upgrade my iPhone in the Fall when the new one is supposed to come out. Up until now, my MacBook had been my MakerBot-controlling machine. Now that I have a nice, speedy Linux laptop with an average of 7 hours of battery life and become more proficient with Linux, I've been using the MacBook less and less. Today, I decided I was going to print more parts from the Mendel-Inspired Lowrider. To do this, I needed to install ReplicatorG. Well, I got it running fine, but it wasn't detecting my serial port (I plan on using the physical RS-232 port on my laptop instead of the USB-TTL convertor). As is the norm with Linux, I figured it was a permissions problem and, lo-and-behold, I was right! This article got me up and running rather quickly. Basically, I just had to sudo chmod a+rw /dev/ttyS0 and I was good to go.

An interesting thing I noticed: for some reason, Skeinforge works a lot faster on my Debian Laptop than my MacBook Pro even though they have the same processor (T7300) and RAM speed (DDR2 667 MHz).

The thought just occurred to me that maybe my Debian Laptop's Skeinforge is faster because the Debian Laptop has an SSD.