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

[Ajai Khattri]

On Tue, 23 Oct 2007, Chris Knadle wrote:

>    This is not wonderful news; if the underlying OS is fragile and upgrades 
> silently modify configs, then I consider it to be "admin hostile".  Half of 
> the benefit of running OSX is having Unix underneith, and making that 
> environment a pain to use removes a portion of that benefit.  :-/

I wouldn't call it hostile exactly nor would I say it makes UNIX a pain to 
use (it doesn't). But, if you're going to edit the Apache config that 
comes with OS X, be aware that an update might overwrite it (in this case, 
I would put the config in another file that is "Include"d into the main 
config - you may have to re-add that Include line after an update).

But the Apache that comes with OS X is 1.3 so the point may be moot. If 
you want Apache 2.x, you install it yourself under /usr/local (where it 
won't be touched by any system updates). Same for PHP (it comes with PHP4 
and I use PHP5 at work, so I installed PHP 5 locally).

For some things, you're just better off using the GUI tools (like adding a 
user for example).

A lot of people install software using DarwinPorts or Fink and use those 
versions instead.

I would say the situation is still a lot better than Windoze.

> advocate who got familiar with OSX Server as well as several Linux distros 
> (Yellow Dog, Debian, Fedora Core, Gentoo).  After several issues that the OSX 
> Server admin GUI didn't cover and having difficulty at the command line 
> compared to Linux, when it came time to choose an OS for a mail server she 
> decided to go for "a real Linux box" instead of another OSX Server.  That was 
> the *last* thing I'd ever expect to hear... yet I keep hearing similar things 
> from others.

I would not use OS X as a server product myself (I wouldn't use Windows 
for any server stuff either :-). But I think of OS X as a desktop OS that 
doesn't require a lot of tinkering and for that, its a fine product.

>    Mail.app does something funky when sending HTML mail; it sends a copy of 
> the email in text and another copy in HTML, both as *attachments*

Yeah, called "Part 1.1" (or something like that). Very annoying.

Also less savvy mail users get confused - they think they've been sent an 
attachment which they can't open :-)

I also had a friend that would forward web pages to me and somehow they 
came through to me as TIFF files (which Thunderbird can't display 
natively) - very "nice".

>    Yeah, and I'm not sure if the version that ships with Tiger contains the 
> library to build universal binaries.  Latest XCode also has gcc 4.

Well that's good - many Linux distros still run gcc 3.



-- 
Aj.