The OS X Item

Sep 18 21:27 UTC 2006

This is the item to discuss OS X, the native operating system of current 
Apple Macintosh computers, and its underlying Unix base, Darwin.

response 2 of 28:

Sep 19 01:21 UTC 2006

There's a big difference between using Darwin and running an OS in Darwin.

response 4 of 28:

Sep 19 21:31 UTC 2006

Darwin road leads to Hell.  (From the east, anyway.)

I'm a pretty sophisticated user of Mac OS X, including enough of its
underlying Mach BSD system to have done some shell scripting --
including a simplified interface for the fs_usage utility -- and
combining of shell- and apple-scripting into functional tools like a
clickable app that takes a partial app name as an input and pauses or
unpauses the matching processes (using kill -STOP and kill -CONT) and a
script in a FileMaker database that automatically uploads a compressed
copy of itself to a webserver upon closing (using curl, in the
background, and only if the file has been modified).

I don't have a lot of experience using other modern OSs except Windows,
so I haven't a lot of basis for comparison except to say that I have had
very little difficulty figuring out a way to make my Mac do just about
anything I want, and I have had extensive difficulty making Windows
machines not do any particular thing I don't want them to do.  

I recently used an Ubuntu machine and was very impressed with the LAMPP
set of tools and the easy interface of the VNC system.  I downloaded an
ISO for my older G3 laptop, but haven't been sufficiently motivated to
install it.