Mac OS 10 Notes

Moving from Linux and FreeBSD operating systems to Mac OS 10 has been
a painful and expensive experience.  Fifteen hundred bucks--US--is a
lot to pay for getting your ass kicked.  I will admit, however, I like
the hardware of the iMac.  It's clean looking, portable, and fast
compared to my old AMD 500Mhz PCs.

MacOS 10 is a limited , proprietary GUI overlay on a reasonably good
BSD Unix operating system.  Too much is missing from the BSD OS to
make it immediately useful.  The gcc compiler is not able to compile
some basic, missing pieces such as readline.



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Network setup on Mac OS X

 "System Preferences" dialog:
    Network
      Advanced
        TCP/IP
          Configure IPv4 - Manually or Using DHCP
        DNS
          DNS Servers - put in IP address/es
          Search Domains - put in your domain

     Make sure to "Apply" changes immediately or they will disappear.

  Host name setup:

    Edit /etc/hostconfig adding "HOSTNAME=hostname.domain

How to add user to wheel group: [This is not correct.]

  dscl - Directory Service Command Line utility
    (replaces NetInfo Manager)

    see man page for dscl

  Still don't know how unless it's as simple as editing /etc/group

OpenOffice did not work on Leopard: it's suppose to, but doesn't.

  Use NeoOffice instead.  NeoOffice is a Mac version of OpenOffice.

GIMP - The version linked from the Apple site would not install on
  MacOS.  I found several other sources but the "got cha's" looked
  like a potential nightmare.  I'll wait to try one of the other
  sources until I'm calmer.  I really hate crap that doesn't work.

readline - would not compile on MacOS.  (Useful for postgresql.)

postgresql - without readline I didn't install.  Probably best to set
  up a Linux or FreeBSD server for this anyway.

Burning CDs and DVDs.

  From "Finder" if you choose to "Burn ISO" you end up with a CD with,
  literally, the ISO file on it.  You can burn the contents of an ISO
  but then it is still not bootable.  What?

  I still use Linux and cdrecord to burn bootable CDs.

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------------------------- Sortware installed ------------------------
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MMA-1.2 [2008-01-21]

    /usr/local/bin
    Python program.  Python was already installed. Works fine.

wget-1.11 [2008-02-01]

    My prefered software for downloading multiple ISOs.

    Installed in: /usr/local/bin

      .configure
      make
      make install