Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Well, I got myself an iBook seven days
ago, and I think Im ready to sound off on some
of the hype around Mac OS X.
As a die hard *nixer now, I decided not to
even install "Classic" on my new iBook SE
(466mHz, 320mb, 10 GB, DVD, Firewire ). I
figured the lack of "mainstream" software
available will catch up, and most of what I
need I can satisfy with open source stuff. This
is mostly true.
First thing, it took me most of the week to
get the machine configured to taste. While OS
X comes with most everything a Mac user
would want, the Unix distro behind the scenes
is a little light. First thing I had to get was
Bash. No problem. The next thing you need to
know is that almost all of the Unixy user stuff
you need to configure is through the
Applications>Tools>NetInfo program. Trying
to change you default shell with /etc/password
does nothing. The file is there, but it doesnt
seem to get read by the OS. Next thing is
changing the root password. It took me a
couple of hours to figure out that you have to
do "sudo passwd root" to set it. It seems silly,
but it counts.
When configuring OS X, the best tool you
can have is Fink. This is just a handy little tool
that has mirror sites for most of the GNU-ish
tools indexed and will do an automated script
to download them, ./configure;make;make
install. Extremely handy. The current version of
XFree86 supports OS X/Darwin out of the box.
I highly recommend going to XonX and
downloading the patch to let XF86 run
"rootless". This lets you mix your Mac OS and
X windows in a single screen without having
flip between two "screens".
Apple's much heralded JVM lives up its
hype for being blisteringly fast. I have run into
some issues with its just not following the
standard filesystem format ( there is no
"JAVA_HOME" type directory, no rt.jar, etc ). So
some java software you have to tweak a bit to
get running cleanly. Apache come pre-
installed, and it was no work at all to get
PostgreSQL and MySQL installed.
The biggest issue I have been running
into is a decent web browser. The IE beta that
is included with the OS is lame. It has obvious
threading issues when its downloading on
high speed connections ( you can tell it holds
the tread for "get data, fill buffer, write buffer"
type actions and it makes it impossible to DL
a couple of files in the background and surf
the web at the same time. I havent been able
to get Mozilla working -- there are some
MAJOR issues with the OSX release there.
Opera has a "Technology Preview" release of
their 5.0 product, but it refuses to install on my
machine, I think this is related to my using the
"Unix Filesystem" instead of the Mac OS ->9.1
HFS system. It tells me that the disk "/" is a
network mount and I can't install there. iCab is
decent. Its EXTEMELY small and fast, but its
rendering fidelity leaves a bit to be desired.
For all your IM needs, I recommend Fire. It is a
combined Jabber, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, IRC
client that works like a champ.
Also, Quake 3 (1.29f) works like a charm.<
/p>
All in all Im pretty pleased. I think the guys
at the office are going to assemble an "add-
on" distribution of binaries that will streamline
the getting OSX up to the level that most *
Nixers would want. If you are a Mac user
though, you can still work it with not brains at
all.
Still lacking in 10.0.4 is a DVD player. That
makes me mad, its been quite a while.
However, on Wed, Jobs demoed the new 10.1
version that looks greatly improved in many of
the usability/functionality areas where OS X is
currently lacking, and will include both DVD
and DVD-R support, as well as SMB
networking. (You can get Samba running, but
the Apple version will be, obviously, much
easier to configure for the average mac-
head).
  fink