[nycbug-talk] Apple as a BSD review.

[Gerald]

On Fri, 20 Feb 2004, Chris McCulloh wrote:

> Thank you for the comments, and from my past experience I completely agree
> with the rest of your message.  However I was wondering if you, or anybody
> else, could elaborate further on some of these nuances.  Especially the
> kind that may be of importance to those of us jumping (back) into Apple
> from the x86 *nix world.

A few things I had to get used to when I dove head first in to Apple.

1: "It just works." It really is a hard concept to get comfortable with at
first. I'm looking for the right control panel to tweak this setting to
make it do what I want it to do, and it just works. This phrase is related
to a broad range of tasks. Dual Headed display (plug in and poof), A lot
of networking stuff. I still don't like that I have to put interface
aliases in at the command line in Panther. I had hoped they would fix
that.

2. Don't try to make it something it isn't. I tried to make Fink be the
FreeBSD ports that I liked. It's not (yet). I tried to make the GUI be
windows or KDE, it's not and won't ever be, but Expose rocks. It's a
BSDlike OS with a GUI. Drop back in to Terminal and you can do anything
you want, but you may have to put together some of the Tools you already
have on FreeBSD...etc. Then some tools are already installed, which
surprised me. (vi, perl, apache (though not turned on), gcc)

3. Some people don't need to hear this, but some might...: Don't be afraid
to download the src code of a piece of software you want and try to
compile it once. (./configure && make) rdesktop compiled just fine in my
home directory long before it was in Fink. (long is relative, I didn't
look for it after I had a working binary.)

4. READ! Good starter book: "Mac OS X for Unix
Geeks" http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mosxgeeks/ Next best but much larger
is the Missing Manual.

5. forums.dealmac.com, lot of good people in there that have answers to
basic and advanced questions.

> Also something nobody has mentioned -- the base iBook is actually $1099
> for the 800MHz 12".  That's its biggest advantage, as the base PowerBook
> is $1599.

I'll answer you off list for this one. I don't see how Mac purchasing
tips would be on topic for NYC-BUG...plus I talk too much anyways.

Gerald