I previously wrote a post on my blog, sorry it's in Dutch, about my first Windows Vista encounters. Vista is a disgrace. To me Vista clearly shows that Microsoft does not think about stability and usability at all. Windows is a technical environment. Microsoft does not know what users need. I am working in the IT business for over 12 year now. I have spent way too much time behind Windows in my life.

I was on the market for a new laptop and I decided to take the plunge and bought a MacBook Pro. My first Apple computer ever. How could I ever have worked without an Apple? Usability is much better, color management is way better (on multiple monitors) and integration with my Linux Samba server is also better. I am becoming to realize that I have spent too much time keeping my Windows PC's up and running. I plan to write some blogs about my migration from Windows to Apple. I am planning to loose all my Windows stuff and migrate fully to Apple and Linux.

My first issue was to find a replacement for iMatch, my image database. I am using iMatch for quite some time now. My Linux server holds over 42.000 images and they are all indexed in iMatch. The performance of iMatch was too low and I needed a new solution to catalog all my images. I invested a lot of time in Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom. For me Lightroom is the best solution. It's super fast when you render all preview images upfront.

But Lightroom refused to create a catalog on my Linux server. Bad news since I have a lot of free space on the server and less on my laptop drive. But then I thought of a simple solution. I read on the internet how to to make Leopards Time Machine work with a Samba share. You can find that article about Time Machine and Samba shares here.

It's possible to trick Lightroom the same way. I used the Diskutility to create a dmg partition image. I created a partion of 100GB on my Linux server and formatted it with Apples Journaled filesystem. You can find the settings that I have used below:

I then created my Light Room database in this virtual disk. Works perfect for me. I was a bit hazardous about performance, but I have encountered no issues at all. I have a gigabit network connection between my server and my laptop. That seems fast enough. I rendered all preview images and my current preview database is around 40GB big.

I will post other experiences about my Windows to Mac migration soon. I still have a few issues to solve before I can get rid of my Windows PC.