Mac Goodness

[bcholmes]

I'm really enjoying the Mac experience. But at times I am completely boggled by having to deal with a level of unfamiliarity that I haven't experienced in 20 years or so.

"Where the hell do I find that?"

"Why are they hiding the /usr directory from me?"

"Is this where this is supposed to go?"

Comments

[lovelyangel.livejournal.com]

Ah. Maybe you need Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks (http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=9846/ur0508m/ur0508m.html).

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

oh! wish i had known about that sooner, *heh*. tnx!

[sola.livejournal.com]

I am dreading moving my mother to X. At least you will never, ever feel compelled to call anyone at work to explain where your shopping list went.

[gloriajn.livejournal.com]

*giggle* The person I'm housesitting for has a Mac OS X Tiger on a PowerBook G4 (I'm typing on it right now, in fact). My Mac experience is very limited, but since I'll be here for five weeks, that will give me plenty of time to get comfortable with it! And at least now, when I apply for jobs, I can add Mac OS to my resume.

S33kr1t Tiger Trick

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

There is no root account, and no root password. Typing "su" at the command prompt of the Terminal application won't do you any good.

But the "sudo" command ("sudo XXXX" means "execute command XXXX with root privileges") works just fine, and you can execute "sudo su" to get a root shell prompt.

[perette.livejournal.com]

If you're looking for obscure UNIX tools, be sure to install the developer's package -- there's an install program in Applications somewhere that installs a bunch of stuff that is missing, such as RCS. If you're looking for open-source packages, Fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net/) has a package manager that makes for easy installation of a lot of open source stuff.

[lovelyangel.livejournal.com]

In lieu of having the book, here's an old list of Top Ten Mac OS X Tips For Unix Geeks (http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/10/22/macforunix.html). The list is a bit dated as it's based on an earlier version of the book. (For example, the default user shell is now bash, not tcsh.)

There are also lots of tips at macosxhints.com. (http://www.macosxhints.com/)

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the links; they've been helpful.