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Top Ten Mac OS X Tips for Unix Geeks
Lisa writes "There are big differences between Mac OS X and
Unix machines. In this MacDevCenter article, Brian Jepson has assembled ten
tips to help achieve a smooth transition from Unix to OS X."
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had a brief segment last night showing the top 10 Mac OS X killer tips.. the link is here with some nifty tricks for your Mac..
If you're looking here for something insightful or thought provoking, you're probably looking in the wrong place.
Actually its Option - Apple - Esc. That gets you to 'force quit'.
I think you'll find that the variations aren't so much variations from Unix, but from Linux. Many of the differences the article outlines are simply "hiding" the Unix from newbies (i.e. dangerous directories) and can easily be over ridden.
The article's comments about NetInfo are a little off as well. OSX has been moving to using NetInfo less and less. 10.2 tends to utilize many more traditional ways of doing things.
I should add that most of those elements are hold overs from NeXT and the Darwin team appears to be making it more like a traditional BSD.
BTW - if you want a good Finder replacement with more Unix tools try Path Finder. It has lots of nice things such as creating SymLinks rather than Aliases etc. (Although Aliases are more powerful, but most Unix tools don't recognize them)
I just plunked down a whopping $20 for Codetek's Virtual Desktop (www.codetek.com).
Its a damn fine piece of software and was the final addon that made Aqua perfect for me.
"That naive cube! How long must I suffer this!" --Sheldon J. Plankton
Space.app, which is free as in beer, in one such solution that provides multiple virtual desktops on Mac OS X. VersionTracker is to Mac OS X what Freshmeat is to Linux.
--- Fox
Is it a big change? yes. Is the whole world upside down? ummm.... no. You still have a shell, all the standard unix utilities and most everything is done the Unix way, even when it's done through the GUI. Personal Web Sharing is Apache. Windows File Sharing is Samba. Printer Sharing is cups. The firewall is a default deny ipfw setup.
Sounds like Unix to me. Though admittedly I'm biased, since I really like the fact that I'm posting this message from a unix box (OS X 10.2.1) that's currently running Illustrator, Photoshop and Quicken, while charging up my iPod.
it uses NetInfo instead of /etc/hosts, /etc/group and /etc/passwd.
/etc/hosts first by default. So unless you're using 10.0 or 10.1, /etc/hosts will work just the way you think it should.
I do feel compelled to point out that OS X actually uses lookupd for host name resolution, and lookupd can be configured to use any number of sources for name-to-address mappings. Under 10.2 and later, lookupd is configured to look in
More info can be found in the lookupd man page.
I write in my journal
* Forget sudo and enable root access (I forget how, I don't have an OS X box in front of me), then use su.
Uhhh... why? If your suggestion resulted in some kind of improvement I might be convinced to go along, but why mess with things that don't need to be messed with? There's no reason at all to enable the root account on your OS X machine. If you absolutely, positively have to have a root shell, you can always use this little trick:
% sudo su -
Password:
#
I write in my journal
Macs are definitely more expensive, but it's not quite as bad as your numbers indicate. You ordered extra RAM and hard drives from Apple; *never* do that, their markups are insane. A stock dual 867 with a GeForce 4Ti is $2050. From third parties, get 1 GB of ram for $250, 2 80 GB drives for $250, a Firewire CD-RW for $150, and you're at $2700 with a better system than you got from the Apple store. Still more than the Dell, but the difference is reduced by half.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
There's nothing magical going on here, it's just the difference between escapes that are processed by the shell before the program ever sees them and correct parameter syntax.
-Kevin
of course for the sake of keeping up, here's my top ten:
In other words, Apple is taking a big step here and embracing open-source about as much as you can expect a big corporation to do. Sure they don't give away the whole farm, but they are promoting an environment which is at least friendly to open-source even if it isn't 100% open.
Sapere aude!
Aliases are sort of a hybrid between a symlink and a hard link. They keep track of the HFS file id of the target file.
Prior to 10.2 the default behavior was to first check the file id, and if that file isn't there any more then check the file location. In 10.2 this behavior changed to be more like a symlink. First it checks the file location, then it checks for a file of the given file id.
To sum up: aliases are more powerful than symlinks because they do everything that a symlink does (when accessed through the mac file apis, not the BSD ones), but can also still find the target file if it's been moved to a different directory.
Did you introduce him to fink? By default, the Mac comes with the entire GNU toolchain, plus perl, python, and a ton of other utilities. If he needed newer versions of perl or python, or if he something else (Ruby, MySQL, PostreSQL, X window, Ant, OCaml, LaTeX, even KDevelop and KDE for Pete's sake!) he just types in
fink install python
for example, and, after five to twenty minutes (depending on the package), he's got whatever he needed. It's as easy as apt-get and it's fully OS X native. Check out the link; there are 1600 packages so far and going up literally daily. So my question is, how experienced was your developer?