MacOSX for Unix geeks?!?

[stefmit]

Hi, everyone,

I've finally bitten the bullet, and after years and years of x86 stuff, I got myself a nice, brand new iBook (choice driven by the underlying *nix flavored OS that Panther promises, as an old timer with Linux as platform, for network and security tools required by my job, combined with my lack of trust in the newer models of laptops, capable of running decenlty Linux - the Centrino issue, for those familiar with the subject). Now here is the deal: I have seen tons of forums and info on 'Unix for MAC users", and "Unix for Unix users, using MAC" ... but nothing about MacOSX for Linux-to-Mac converts. Or - in other words - where would you advise someone totally clueless about Mac GUI and the likes, to start from?

What have I done between last night (when I got the iBook) and today? Downloaded half the night the gcc package (developer tools) from Apple, and planning to get fink and finkcommander. But this IS it!

Any kind soul willing to share some pointers with me?

TIA,
Stef

P.S. I wonder how many people are in the same "boat" as I am, and if there may be worth an entire forum for ex_*nix --> Mac converts ?!?

[ex2bot]

Welcome to the LIGHT!

Didn't you get a developer tools (xtools) cd with your system? Or were you fetching updates to the tools?

A couple things off the top of my head:

1. Put the Terminal program on your Dock by going to /Applications/Utilities and dragging it somewhere on the left side of the Dock. The Dock icons are aliases (or shortcuts or whatever you want to call them) so you won't have moved anything.

2. Get Apple's "X11" app, their version of XFree 86. It will integrate X-Windows with Aqua including OpenGl acceleration under X-Windows as well as 3-d acceleration of 2-d window contents (Quartz Extreme), something not offered by anyone but Apple.

Of course, any of your favorite Linux apps and utilities for which you can't find Darwin binaries should compile without much trouble. But there are a ton of binaries available.

3. Hit <Apple Key> S (Apple key is called "command") when starting up the machine to enter single user mode. Here you can run fsck (the hfs version) if you wish.

4. You're probably NOT going to want to format any drives using UFS; Apple's implementation is very slow and not completely compatible with the Mac stuff.

Apple's Hierarchical File System +, brought over from the "classic" Mac OS is pretty good and journaling has been added. There's a case-sensitive version and a case-insensitive version. You'll probably want to stick with the case-INsensitive version, believe it or not. It usually works fine, unless you have apps that have same-named files with different case. Obviously, none of the OS X or classic Mac apps will have a problem with case-insensitivity.

Why stay away from the case-sensitive version? It's brand new and (relatively) untested. Who knows what kinds of incompatibilities might crop up.

5. OpenOffice.org seems to work quite well on OS X under X11. You could even use the Unix version of (gasp!) Microsoft Office ("Microsoft Office v.X for OS X) if you wish. For a Microsoft product, it's real purty. Also, OS X's TextEdit, the gui text editor, will read and write .doc files.

6. OS X's Preview gui app shows .PDF files REALLY QUICKLY, much faster than Acrobat Reader/Adobe Reader.

7. OS X's Mail app (starting with OS X 10.3) shows HTML emails quite well and is overall a good email app. You have several other choices. There's Microsoft Entourage, part of MS Office, very similar to Outlook; Eudora, of course Pine and Elm, etc.

I could go on and on but at some point my *nix ignorance would show. I'm not really a *nix guy. I'm still a nuB. In fact, I was running Winblows (ugh) until a couple years ago when the governor of Michigan bought me an iBook (true story -- we go way back. . .).

As for Linux to OS X switchers' books, I'm not sure. Check out www.oreilly.com (and www.macdevcenter.com).

Have fun.

Doug

[stefmit]

Doug,

Thanks a lot for the quick and thorough response :-) See comments inline:

Welcome to the LIGHT!
Didn't you get a developer tools (xtools) cd with your system? Or were you fetching updates to the tools?

No, I didn't ... or I do not recall anything spelled out as such, on the bunch of CDs I got with my iBook?!?. I thought I may need the whole package, not only the updates. I was actually unssuccesful in installing the tools from Apple's developer site, last night (though - after downloading the 548MB - no error came up, when trying to install it would complain about part 001, which seemed to have been missing from the site altogether?!?). I will have to do some more digging tonight.

2. Get Apple's "X11" app, their version of XFree 86. It will integrate X-Windows with Aqua including OpenGl acceleration under X-Windows as well as 3-d acceleration of 2-d window contents (Quartz Extreme), something not offered by anyone but Apple.

What would be the benefit of this, vs. the "X" delivered by default? I do not want to install really everything from my previous Linux "world" (I may as well have gotten Yellow Dog Linux, then), but rather take advantage of what Mac has had to offer for so many year - nice X. Or are you referring to possible incompatibilities between some old "X" programs, if ported to Mac OSX?

Why stay away from the case-sensitive version? It's brand new and (relatively) untested. Who knows what kinds of incompatibilities might crop up.

This may be a bummer ...

5. OpenOffice.org seems to work quite well on OS X under X11. You could even use the Unix version of (gasp!) Microsoft Office ("Microsoft Office v.X for OS X) if you wish. For a Microsoft product, it's real purty. Also, OS X's TextEdit, the gui text editor, will read and write .doc files.

I just read somewhere about problems with OO and printing on HP ... oh, well, I will have to try it myself, to see what's going on there ...

7. OS X's Mail app (starting with OS X 10.3) shows HTML emails quite well and is overall a good email app. You have several other choices. There's Microsoft Entourage, part of MS Office, very similar to Outlook; Eudora, of course Pine and Elm, etc.

I hate passionately HTML emails. I will have to look into pine or something ... but - again - temporarily the existing email app may do just fine. The need for communication is higher than the willingness to kill HTML emailing right away, on my new Mac.

Thanks again!!!
Stef

[btoneill]

Originally Posted by stefmit

What would be the benefit of this, vs. the "X" delivered by default? I do not want to install really everything from my previous Linux "world" (I may as well have gotten Yellow Dog Linux, then), but rather take advantage of what Mac has had to offer for so many year - nice X. Or are you referring to possible incompatibilities between some old "X" programs, if ported to Mac OSX?

I think you're confusing OS X with X11. In order to run any X11 based apps you need to use Apples X11.app application (or the XFree86 version, but the X11.app is easier), basically will run a rootless X11 server on the desktop, and all the X11 windows will be controlled just as normal Aqua windows are. Aqua itself doesn't directly support the X11 environment. Or, I might be misunderstanding your respose, people love to get confused with "OS X" and "X11", especially as most people refer to X11 simple as X

Originally Posted by stefmit

I hate passionately HTML emails. I will have to look into pine or something ... but - again - temporarily the existing email app may do just fine. The need for communication is higher than the willingness to kill HTML emailing right away, on my new Mac.

Mail.app can send in plain text, doesn't have to do HTML, it's just that it is pretty good at displaying it if thats your cup of tea

As for the Mac GUI itself and the other Mac'isms, go to http://www.info.apple.com/usen/panther. There are alot of good topics there on getting started with OS X, also the "Using Mac OS X (Panther)" discussion forum on http://discussions.info.apple.com. Also, feel free to ask anything here too I mostly use the discussions board from Apple to simple search for issues/resolutions, as actually posting there you can get a low signal to noise ratio.


Brian

[btoneill]

Oh, I also forgot, if you got a .Mac membership, there is an online training course for 10.2.

Brian

[ex2bot]

Developer tools:
I don't know what they're including with iBooks, but I thought that they were including XTools (the new name for the OS X developer tools) with the rest of the operating system. It's on its own disk. if you continue to have problems, you might want to use your 90 day free tech support and get them to find it for you.

X-Windows:

OS X uses a proprietary windowing system called Aqua, derived from the NextStep Postscript-based windowing system from the olden days. It is VERY powerful, with a sophisticated compositing engine, true transparency, in many ways much more powerful than ANYTHING out there.

But, if you want to run X-Windows applications, you'll need X-Windows. If you don't want to run OpenOffice, Gimp, etc., forget about X11. There are many, many powerful programs that run natively on OS X.

Case Sensitivity:
There was a lot of discussion about case sensitivity problems early on. Except in very rare situations, it hasn't been a problem at all.

OpenOffice:
I have a Lexmark inkjet. I don't know about HP printers. BTW, OS X uses CUPS, so you will have access to a gazillion printer drivers. That's helpful mostly if you have older printers.

OS X Mail:
I argree with you about HTML messages mostly. But I subscribe to Lockergnome and some other HTML newsletters. It's nice being able to see the thing correctly.

You can actually set preferences so that the program doesn't load imbedded messages and objects in HTML messages. Go to the application menu (the menu named for the program) and select Preferences>Viewing.

BTW, malicious HTML messages have thus far had no effect on Macs.

Doug

[ex2bot]

BTW,

Check out /Applications/Utilities. You may find some of these gui utilities useful, such as Network Utility. Nothing you couldn't do with command-line tools, of course.

Doug

[Viro]

Instead of running OpenOffice which uses X11 and as such, the fonts aren't really as nice as the rest of OS X. You might want to take a look at NeoOffice.

NeoOffice is based on OpenOffice 1.0.3 (1.1 coming soon), and it uses Java instead of X11. So you get really nice fonts, and the performance isn't bad either as Java is pretty snappy on OS X.