<OT> learning OSX from a Linux perspective

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Oct 17, 2007, Lonni J Friedman wrote:
>On 10/17/07, Bill Campbell <linux-sxs at celestial.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Oct 17, 2007, Lonni J Friedman wrote:
>> >I'm getting stuck with having to admin some OSX systems.  Sadly, I
>> >can't blow them away and install Linux, so I'm going to have to
>> >actually learn how OSX works under the GUI.  Does anyone know of any
>> >decent web sites which go over how OSX differs from Linux, or how to
>> >admin an OSX system if you already have a Linux background?
>> >
>> >I basically need to know all the basics (user creation, daemons, init
>> >scripts, package mgmt, etc).  thanks
>>
>> O'Reilly has a couple of books that may be useful, ``Mac OS X Tiger for
>> Unix Geeks'' is the latest that I've seen.  There are other tomes available
>> that may be useful if one has to get down and dirty with internal things,
>> but I've rarely had user for them.  Apple has been getting away from their
>> NeXT based management to one that's more standard Unix (and the next
>> release, Leopard, is fully certified Unix by the Open Group).
>
>That's good, cause Leopard is what I'm using.  Err, will be using.
>yea, that's what i meant.  ;)

Leopard won't be available until later this month.  Most of the
current machines are running Tiger, OS X 10.4, although I know
many people still on earlier versions.

>> I'm using the OpenPKG portable package management system on our in-house
>> machines to get some open source and locally developed software working.
>> OpenPKG handles the run control for software installed under it, in a
>> manner that's very close to FreeBSD.
>
>I stumbled across darwinports.com today, and it looks like a decent
>package mgmt system, although its annoying that I have to build
>everything from source.  I was going to use Fink, but their retarded
>installer doesn't like that i'm not running the latest officially
>released version, and refuses to proceed.

Fink is basically a debian package manager (which may be why I've
avoided it for much other than the gimp and some simple things
that I want to get quickly).  I think that fink is happy to do an
in-place update of packages including fink itself, but I could
well be mistaken about that.

>> BTW:  I recently read a posting from somebody who has tried various
>> flavours of Linux on Mac hardware, only to find that OS X was faster and
>> more eficient, which surprised me.
>
>WHere did you read that?  I guess its not too xurprising, seeing as
>how people have been claiming that *BSD is faster than Linux for
>years.

I think it was on one of the SCO news groups in a discussion about what
people would be doing now that SCO's attempting to go into Chapter 11 to
avoid having to pay Novell.  The person who wrote it was a long-time Linux
guy who inherited an older G4 box, trying Yellow Dog, and other Linux
distributions on it before going to OS X.

The thing that led to his posting was a comment I had made of my experience
that each new release of OS X seems faster than the previous release on the
same hardware, and that Apple has done a good job of supporting old
hardware with OS X.

Bill
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