[nylug-talk] My PC laptop dies. I am having to use a Mac.

[Ajai Khattri]

On Sat, 20 Oct 2007, Brandorr wrote:

> - Fusion or Parallels?

In the past, Ive liked Parallels quite a lot but Fusion is much better.
(If you want free, try VirtualBox).

> - How do you do system administration of the underlying OS?

Depends. Its a BSD derivative (more or less). You can use the command-line 
(sudo in a Terminal) to edit files but generally I dont mess with it too 
much because updates could overwrite your changes. Also, Apple have their 
own tools for certain things that you dont find in "classic" UNIX.

> - What is the best browser? Opera, Safari, Ffox, or Camino

Firefox is generally very very good.

> - Are there any good IMAP clients that index your stores for fast searching?

Dont know - I use Thunderbird (but mainly because I dont like Apple Mail 
much), but Apple Mail has Spotlight searching...

> - Is fink the way to go for Opensource apps?

I think so (though Ive been using Prefix Portage for this at work).

> - What is the best terminal program?

Your main choices are: Terminal, iTerm or GLTerm

Terminal: comes with the machine (I installed Visor to give a Quake-style 
dropdown console).

iTerm: Very decent terminal (I preferred its clipboard handling until I 
found Visor :-)

GLTerm: supposedly the fastest terminal but Ive not played with it much.

> - What is the best program for keyboard shortcuts? (I want to be able
> to pop up terminal windows with a few keystrokes.)

This is why I use Visor and run screen inside it.

> - What the heck is widgets/dashboard? It seems like a waste.

You can disable it / hide it.

> - Are iCal, iChat, etc worth using?

I prefer Adium to iChat... allows me to be logged into several IM 
networks, not just AIM.

> - What is supposed to be so good about Mac OS X?


> - RSS Reader?

Shrook is pretty good. But if you're using Thunderbird and/or Firefox they 
can handle RSS feeds too (as can Safari). Fire (co$t) is very nice.

> - I hear that Macs make good developer laptops. Why?

Because unlike a Windows box, it comes with all the nice UNIX dev tools 
(compiler, make, various scripting languages like Python, Ruby, perl, 
etc). I have Subversion and MySQL running quite happily. Macs come with 
Apache, and ssh built-in. Many developers prefer working in UNIX for the 
tools.

On Windows these are things you must find and add yourself (or find 
substitutes for).

> - Are there any "must have" apps I should go download?

For playing Windows media, look at Flip4Mac (adds WM to QuickTime Player).

GUI tweaks, grab TinkerTool2.

I have a lot of Mac versions of open source apps installed.

For Open Office, find and install NeoOffice.

I have GIMP (needs X11) and Audacity installed.

(For X11, you can get that from the install/developer CDs that come with 
the machine).

For torrents, I use Tomato Torrent.

Grab VLC and ffmpegX for video playback and conversion. I also have 
mplayer for OS X.

I use Desktop Manager for virtual desktops (though the next release of OS 
X will maybe remove the need for it).

I use synergy to share my mouse+keyboard across Mac and Linux at home 
(there is a GUI tool for Mac too but Ive never used it).

I have all the developer tools installed, which are on the CDs that come 
with the machine.



-- 
Aj.