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FYI, http://www.bresink.com/osx/Tin... has some options but not all. Maybe it will help you?

http://www.bresink.com/osx/Tin...

Although I presume it's too late to change your mind, you should know that you can in fact enable focus-follows-mounse at least for Terminal windows, with an app like TinkerTool. Hope it makes the last few months more tolerable at least. :P

... Also, even after several years, it still bothers me that closing a window on a Mac doesn't terminate the application. I can understand the philosophical rationale (for what it's worth) behind this, but it seems unnecessary and wasteful.

It's funny, but I actually like the differentiation between closing a window and an application. But I do a lot via the keyboard, not the mouse, so when I want to close a window I use Command-W and know that the application will still be in memory to use Command-O or Command-N rather than having to relaunch the app. If I want to quit then I use Command-Q. I was actually a bit annoyed when they changed "single window/document/view" type applications to exit when their window was closed (though I get the rational.)

I also launch everything from Spotlight rather than spelunking around the Finder. One of the funniest things to me is how people (not saying you) assume that Mac OS X is not for power users and is mouse centric. But if you enable "All Controls" in System Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts, have Spotlight enabled and know the difference between Command-Tab and Command-`, you can do most driving from the keyboard. Add the Automater's Save As Service, the consistent Service interface, applescript and the ability to assign global, application and context sensitive keyboard shortcuts and for me Mac OS X is a power user's dream. All right out of the box. For instance, using the Application's Shortcuts I've bound Command-. to bring up the System Preferences and by creating a "Finder Application.app" in the automator I can use Spotlight to jump right to the finder rather than tabbing through 20 apps or mousing around in expose. Plus Shift-Command-G in virtually any file dialog and Finder and you can type in a path rather than click up and down folder hierarchies.

While I'm in fanboy mode, I'll mention what I love most is the consistency. All (non-MS) application's text edit areas support the basic emacs-like ^a, ^d ^e, and ^k functionality. I'm an old emacs/bash guy, so I'm happy, even if it makes no sense to young-uns. Also, once you know about property lists, you can figure out where prefs are for 99% of applications. And if you can find to the right docs, you can tweak away. It almost sucks that there is no uninstaller, but it rarely matters and if you care - once again the consistency tells you exactly where to look for any left over files. I think that the "application bundle" is a great way to deal with managing all the files related to a program.

Apologies for the fanboyism. I also came from years of Linux experience, which I loved. But for some reason Mac OS X just "clicked" for me.

If you don't have it, I highly recommend TinkerTool which is free "as in beer" to explore some level of system/UI tweaking. Also, Lingon

is a pretty decent open source tool for navigating all the system and user startup services provided by launchd. It's no longer under development, but it's an Apache licensed program and pretty useful so maybe someone will pick it up. I install Lingon via MacPorts (though the git based HomeBrew" is intriguing...)

OK, I'll go away now...

Actually you can change the system font size on OS X, it's just not exposed by the Apple provided configuration tools. Probably because it's not terribly useful for most of their users because most of their users are using machines with built in displays. If you really want to adjust the font size use TinkerTool:
http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html

That's what TinkerTool is for. It hasn't been updated for Leopard yet, but I doubt it will take long. Now as to why Apple didn't do that is an entirely different story...

I have some experience with Mac OS X in a mixed enterprise environment, consisting of Linux servers and Linux and Windows desktops. Linux desktops use NFS and NIS, while Windows machines are using a Samba domain controller on the Linux servers. So far so good. Till the moment we got some Mac OS X desktops. Mac OS X is Unix, so using NFS and NIS should be easy, right? Wrong! First, Mac OS X has really crippled the Unix back-end: there's no more fstab file, no more init scripts we *nix users are used too,... To integrate Mac OS X in NIS, there's a graphical interface. But: it does not really work! Most of the time, network accounts simply won't be available when the login screen appears, if you configure it like that. Using the configuration files, already works a bit better, but even then it often does not work. Workarounds mentioned in a Mac OS X and NIS HOWTO, consist of adding ugly sleeps and killall -HUP lookupd commands in some scripts. We found out, things work most reliable, if you force lookupd to use at maximum 1 thread. It seems like lookupd is full of race conditions :-/ And even now, sometimes machines hang on a blue screen when shutting down Mac OS X. And when a user gets over quota, his whole session hangs with a "spinning beachball of death".

On the above mentioned web page, the conclusion is:
"we officially withdraw the statement that NIS features are compatible with current versions of 10.4."

I cannot agree more. Mac OS X is certainly not enterprise ready to be integrated in mixed environments.

See Marcel Bresink's utility Temperature Monitor at http://www.bresink.com/osx/TemperatureMonitor.html .

Is the startup sound on Macs customizable?

No it isn't. It is built into the firmware and will change, when an error occurs. Just like beep codes on a PC, but sounds nicer.

Beside from not being customizable, the startup chrd can easily be turned off. There are a number of third party tools like StartupSound.prefPane and TinkerTool System , or you could easily enter

sudo nvram boot-volume=0

The Mac chime is a part of the BIOS.

To be more precise, it is part of the Open Firmware. The word "Open" in Open Firmware doesn't mean the firmware is open source, but that it has an open API. Thus one can manipulate the firmware using this API without having to deal with a proprietary BIOS screen. E.g. the

nvram

To disable the startup chime just execute

nvram boot-volume=0

So the startup chime of the Open Firmware isn't mandatory, but it is not very well documented, how to disable it. From a sophisticated platform like the Mac, I would expect an easily accessible control in the system preferences, not some thirdpary add-ons or obscure acrobatic on the command line; but perhaps I'm just spoiled over the years with OS X.

I've sent mine back for another power supply. And disabling the CPU nap worked to kill the noise, also.

Check out this little program to confirm:

http://www.bresink.com/osx/SystemLoad.html

You can turn off some things with TinkerTool.

For instance, if you need fine-grained control over your HTTP user-agent header, Safari won't let you change that but you can just install Firefox or Mozilla.

Hopefully not a dead thread... :)

I specifically call -3 when calling the mount with NFS Manager. It's nagware and does a great job IMHO.

I've been hitting this same wall since I hit the 2G limit with ext2 on the Linux end. That forced my migration to ext3, then updated it's NFS then updated the Mac then it still doesn't work. :()

Today I still resort to SMB connections and for backup use DeJaVu to a SMB connected sparse disk image (works like a charm). Why does NFS suck bunnies through straws with your experience? In mine I am able to saturate 100Mbit and 1,000Mbit connections (~9M/sec and ~90M/sec) with the right equipment on either end (1Gbit connected, SCSI-320's, etc :) ... all via NFS. I'm lucky to see 6-7Mbit/sec speeds with a SMB connection it seems (100Mbit). ssh loses about 5-10% in speed (from saturation) and ftp/http are also mechanisms I've used for transferring as they can go full speed. WebDav isn't bad either, but I want my NFS! :)

ioreg -l | grep -C10 temp

http://www.bresink.com/osx/nis.html