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Article Path: Home: Computers and Technology: Leopard as Unix

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If you really want to use su, why not do
sudo su -
?

Thanks, Tim, but that’s a minor issue, actually. I was pointing out the sort of thing a Unix user would run into using a Mac. Not a cry for help on my part, just warning other Unix users.

you cant afford iwork and business apps are few and far? iwork is £55 and office is about £290

“However, for anything requiring root, you’ll need to do it the Ubuntu way, using sudo.”

Err, that should be Ubuntu does it the OSX way, shouldn’t it?
OSX precedes Ubuntu by 4 years. As a “Mac-Head” and a UNIX
geek, these kinds of statements seem to irk me. And, as far
as looking for good Mac help, I agree most of it is slanted
towards the typical Mac crowd, but I find a lot of good info
geared towards the typical UNIX sysadmin out there as well.
It’s nice to know that Jordan Hubbard is in charge of the
BSD technology group at Apple

Using Leopard as a *nix machine was one of the big draws for me as well. Having used Linux since the mid 90’s, I really do enjoy having a better GUI but still having the *nix guts.

Need Mac Unix help?
http://forums.macosxhints.com/
Choose the Unix - General forum. If you can’t get what you need there, they can tell you where to get it.

Here is a good source for Unix folks.

Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks, Third Edition O’REILLY.

Have you requested copies of iWorks as a non-profit?

Hard drive space is easy, add an external firewire drive and load’er up.

Don’t forget to upgrade the RAM, cheap…

Have fun.

I have to second MTBOY; I’ve used a PowerBook of your eMac’s vintage as my primary computer for the past four years, and upping the RAM to 1 GB makes it a completely different machine… and that old RAM’s really cheap on eBay.

If Xcode 3 won’t install why not download Xcode 2.5?

http://developer.apple.com/tools/download/

That way you can build Fink as per their Leopard instructions, or get MacPorts (which doesn’t actually require X11 for everything).

Another thing you could do is remove architecture code (strip x86 out - you usually don’t need it) and language files. That can save about 4GB.

“For Unix people, it’s not a usable mouse without three buttons.”

Real “Unix people” go straight to the terminal and use the CLI!

"Leopard does Unix a lot better" [than Panther]

Ridiculous. They're both BSD underneath. Leopard just adds a bunch of user-level goodies.

"Getting a standard root login via su is a rather convoluted path via places you'd never look."

Yeah, like the Help menu. This is a very simple procedure.

"Everybody uses X because it's the only thing we have in Unix Land."

I don't think this guy even knows what Unix is.

I fail to see the wisdom on this article …

Are you saying that Unix guys will be “confused” with the Mac?? Was it less confusing when it was NeXTStep?

As far as the one button mouse… buy a Logitech 4 button mouse if that is what you want.

X-Windows is more than just a display thingy.. it is a protocol … Session layer in the OSI model, right there with NFS, RPC, etc. Maybe that is WHY a lot of REAL Unix users use it, not only those Linux Unix-Wannabes …

Use the help system and look up “enabling root user” - OS X has this account disabled by default.

As others have suggested, stripping out the language files (available in the install options or doable by hand) and using a free tool such as Xslimmer will get you back your drive space. Memory would really help out as well.

HTH

Regarding the multi-button mouse, just get one, and check out the mouse pref pane, in the system preferences, you can set it to do lots of things, also if it has drivers for OS X, like my logitec laptop mouse, you can install that and it’ll let you customize what the buttons do.

Just set the middle button do do Command-C, for copy

hope that helps

Oh, how I love the roasts. Keep `em coming, folks.

For those of you who actually addressed the issues I raised, thank you. I was looking forward to your help. Articles like this are nothing without ribbing and corrections.

Regarding the mouse paste issue: It works even in the CLI, Eric, and I used it a lot on my console-only BSD machines for pasting long strings of text. Using the native GUI drivers to make the middle button do “Cmd+V” breaks other useful functions, so it’s easier to simply drop that mouse paste habit. Without an independent mouse clipboard, it won’t be the same.

Check back as I continue the migration test. Perhaps I can paint a bigger target on myself for your barbs.

Maybe I’m just missing something fundamental… Can you help me understand what it means, exactly, to “do Unix”? And how one system might “do Unix” better than another? I don’t understand what the purpose of your article is— what target are you trying to achieve?

It’s partly that I’m kind of distracted by all of the talk about mice and keyboards… I thought Unix was a family of operating systems. That family includes OS X— which is a Unix variant. Talking about moving from Unix to Mac makes about as much sense as talking about moving from Unix to Linux.

I’ve steered clear of the package installers, and do my builds from source. You should be able to at least force gcc to install from the developer tools. For what it’s worth, I haven’t found more than a small handful of packages I couldn’t ./configure;make;sudo make install

alias makeMeRoot=’sudo su -‘

Me thinks someone just wants some extra traffic to their site……..

The main point you seem to be making is ‘Why can’t OSX be more like I want it to?’, which is just a little bit to close to the attitude which you seem to be ridiculing. Mac heads, PC guys, Unix guru’s, linux nutters, we’re all in our own little worlds. At least there is some choice.

As for the cost, you cannot compare your home made tower PC with a Mac Pro. With minimal hardware knowledge it is obvious why. There may be room in Apple’s lineup for a consumer tower, but that’s another argument…

Okay, let’s try this from a different angle.

Small businessman or non-profit operator likes BSD and Linux. Stumbles across an aging Mac, dirt cheap or free. Yeah, we all know it’s a Unix variant, but he has never messed with Mac much. How much of a hassle will this average *nix user have trying to bring his skills to bear on said Mac? “Doing Unix” is just an expression for the collection of expectations the average Linux/BSD user has when he approaches a computer. Not the expert technician, nor the OS guru, but the guy who simply uses computers for his work. It’s our favorite tool, but it’s still just a tool.

Open for Business began pretty much as a small business webzine. I have long experience with non-profit, so I’m adding that angle to the ostensible purpose for which we exist.

I’m not running for public office, nor do I even pretend any great expertise. It’s just a hobby. I love doing this, and emails I get indicate some of my articles are helping other folks with similar backgrounds and similar uses for the computers they happen to have.

Ok, that makes things a little more clear— you’re not looking at how well Macs “do Unix” but you’re looking at how similar OS X is to Linux. More specifically, you’re looking at how similar OS X on an eMac is to Linux on some other favorite piece of hardware which is why mice and keyboards dominate the discussion.

That’s a legitimate angle to take, particularly because you’re right in noticing that most online sources aren’t aimed at Linux people exploring Darwin. There is a lot of Unix help for Mackies, but it’s not what gets the most attention.

I think you’d get more sympathy though if you didn’t sound like you were coming out spoiling for a fight. Statements like “And I fully expect scolding from a bunch of Mac-heads, but nothing new nor compelling is likely to appear” are a magnet for abuse, as is reveling in the “roast”. Appealing to the typical “no selection and too expensive” argument on software was a bit disingenuous when you went with a port of Open Office— the standard, free, and quite capable, Unix enterprise suite.

Your lose use of the term Unix is equally likely to get abuse from the *nix folks. Leopard is Unix, while Linux and BSD are not— they’re Unix-like. It’s silly, but it’s a trademark issue and trademark owners are required by law to fight silly wars.

Burrowing to the command line in any Unix variant is not for the faint of heart. Don’t know that you need to be an expert, or a guru, but you’ll need to be adept at man, which and Google. The Apple knowledge base is quite helpful, but doesn’t often show up in Google results.

When you get past the keyboard and mouse idiosyncrasies, and a bit more comfortable with System Preferences, you should have fun with the unique aspects of Darwin itself. The replacement of cron, xinetd and rc by launchd, for instance, is a substantial change.

What do you use your systems for on a daily basis?

Disingenuous? More like having fun at the expense of purists. I don’t take myself that seriously.

My daily use is mostly research and writing, largely academic. All my printers are dot-matrix, and I print very little. I have a substantial library of my own work in text and HTML, and keep reference copies of stuff by others I need for my own use. I require a Bible text I can search. That business with the mouse clipboard is a major tool. Joe and Cream/Vim for most things, as I code HTML on the fly (static only). Lyx for large printing projects, and OO.org for compatibility only.

While I focus on my peculiar brand of religion mostly, my personal interests are too wide to summarize. Social Sciences figure large, and I enjoy reading about Net security. I enjoy the occasional take down of spammers, malware distributers, and such, taking a few risks in places I’m likely to visit. I need multiple different types of browsers for this: lynx, elinks, w3m, links2, FireFox, Opera, Konqueror, plus wget (or fetch). I’m cagey about graphics, don’t much like media stuff, and insist on fine-grained cookie control. I also research the ongoing noise of a lot of “underground” political sites.

I may eventually fiddle with running a LAN server, or even self-host my online religious activities. Depends on how much interest it gets in the next few months.

cough
Debian ppc
cough

“However, for anything requiring root, you’ll need to do it the Ubuntu way, using sudo. ”

root doesn’t have a password by default..

“sudo password root”
wow, now su works.
that was really convoluted and hard.

Don’t write articles about Unix when you don’t actually know Unix. Middle button click? Come on. Lets not even go there.

So, I am delighted to find that my Mighty Mouse will indeed paste (in X) if I set the scroll ball to “Button 3” in the mouse System Preferences.

I have been using Unix as my primary desktop environment since 1998, when I started working at HP. I have used Linux since late 2000 and only now in 2008 have I switched to using OSX. I took the leap because I needed mature, reliable support for office apps and formats. These were an instant win on Tiger and Leopard.

However, trying to use OSX as I used to use Linux has been very painful. The whole experience is very dumbed down and does not have that fast bleeding-edge open-source feeling that you get from Linux. I have noticed many linuxen are taking similar tracks in order to appeal to the masses. I hope they don’t diverge too far from the basic principles of what made Unix good. As soon as I become dependant on the distro to make core parts of the operating system usable, I start to loose faith. I don’t want to loose the faith.

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The Disaster of the Rolling Release

By Ed Hurst

I've always enjoyed exploring. Every time I've moved from one residence to another, I've always wandered around my new neighborhood, simply to see what was there. It's the same with computer technology. I love poking around operating systems. Lately, one aspect of this has gotten tiring in every Open Source operating system: the rolling release. The phrase refers to the sometimes feverish effort to add new features, long before the old ones even work properly.

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