Hi Chris, Orin, and Others, You pointed to a number of on-line Unix tutorials for information on basic concepts and applications (such as terminal) that are used on the Mac, and also noted the problems of distinguishing details that arise from the different flavors of unix and linux.
CB: > Learning unix is probably beyond the scope of this >mailing list though. Here is nice basics tutorial called Learn Unix in >10 Minutes: > >http://freeengineer.org/learnUNIXin10minutes.html > >Here is another one: > >http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/unixintro.html > >Lots of books out there as well if you want to dive deeper. Only >annoying bit is there are a lot of Unix flavors. Sort of like different >dialects of English. Mostly similar but not the same. That means >commands for Linux might not work perfectly or without modification on >Solaris or MacOSX etc. A good, but slightly old source of information on the differences between Mac OS X and Unix is "Top Ten Mac OS X Tips for Unix Geeks" at the O'Reilly macdevcenter pages: http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/10/22/macforunix.html This is an old document that outlines the different file layout of Mac OS X, what shell is used, what happens at startup and shutdown, etc. It was written before Tiger, but was updated last summer because the page continued to be popular. The audience is users who are coming to the Mac with some familiarity of unix or linux, but who want a quick rundown of what's different in Mac OS X. While this doesn't cover more recent items (such as the use of Macports to build open source software in addition to Fink, which is mentioned), this is useful page. A couple of extra accessibility pluses for the O'Reilly macdevcenter.com pages: 1. You can use the item chooser menu to select the "print" link and get a printer-friendly version of this page at: http://www.macdevcenter.com/lpt/a/2792 2. The original web page also has a "Listen" link that lets you listen to the content of this page or navigate to download an mp3 file of this page from the player that get launched. (This page pre-dates VoiceOver). You proably won't want to listen to the mp3 file unless you can download it and speed it up, and they haven't updated the recorded version -- only the web page versions. So, for example, you'd hear that the default shell is tcsh (instead of bash), and other items that have changed. The O'Reilly Press books are also availabie internationally to visually disbled from Bookshare: http://www.bookshare.org/ HTH Cheers, Esther
