> From: [email protected] [mailto:discuss-
> [email protected]] On Behalf Of Eric Chadbourne
>
> I just got a new mac mini for the holidays. I’ve been living on gnu/linux for
> the last decade and it’s kind of fun to play in another OS. Learning lots of
> new stuff.
BTW, if you're used to linux and new to osx, here are a couple of useful tips:
OSX uses a case insensitive filesystem. Don't expect anything different and
don't try to change it. You'll shoot yourself trying.
Absolutely embrace timemachine. It sets the gold standard that everyone else
should strive to.
Also enable filevault. There's *almost* no reason not to, and you'll see what
others have been missing out on. (* The reasons not to enable filevault are
basically fear of your own data loss, if you don't trust yourself to maintain
good backups and forget your own password. Or if you need the system to boot
itself unattended.)
Although MS Office is available for macs, it's not as powerful and not as good
as the windows alternatives. If you use them regularly, you're best off to
have a windows VM.
Anytime you hear somebody say "It's just BSD" shun them and call out their
ignorance. Nobody says that who knows jack about macs. To say that OSX is BSD
is just as smart and useful as saying Windows is VMS. There's a kernel of
truth (see what I did there?) that has no application in the real world. They
are 100% different OSes with no similarities.
You are learning about launchd. Keep it up. Don't mess with it too much -
generally speaking the out-of-the-box configuration is right, and you'll cause
problems for yourself by disabling stuff. But for academic and/or
troubleshooting purposes, valuable knowledge.
Forget about macports and fink - Install homebrew. You'll notice occasionally,
some tool is missing, which you would like to install via yum or apt, but of
course, there is no package manager in OSX. The first one you'll probably
notice is wget. In 2 seconds, you can install homebrew, and then "brew install
wget."
Before you go crazy installing stuff with homebrew, install XCode and the XCode
command line utilities. This will get most of the stuff you are missing -
build tools, which I think include make but not automake, or something like
that. But at least it includes stuff like svn and git and gcc and most of what
you care about. In my world, I install XCode and XCode command line tools,
homebrew, and brew install wget. And generally speaking, that's the end of the
story. Rarely ever need to install any command-line utilities beyond that.
Newbies do a lot of browsing the "Applications" folder, and linking a zillion
things to their dock. That's good while you're a newbie, learning what's
available. Before too long, you just hit Command-Space and type the name of
what you want into spotlight.
Under system preferences, go to your mouse and trackpad. Actually watch their
tutorials. Extremely useful to learn the gestures, so you know about launchpad
and mission control and multiple desktops. Literally in the hundreds of users
that I've supported using macs - as soon as somebody got used to the trackpad,
they never go back. It's universal that all users prefer the mac trackpad over
a mouse or any alternative that's available in windows or other platforms. It
actually becomes the #1 repeat mac-buying factor in peoples' choices for a new
system in later years.
Personal preference:
Launch Finder.
Change to View As List.
Click on View / Show Path Bar
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