OSX for a penguinista?

I'm not going over. Yet. However I want to have a go at IOS development and it is only hosted on OSX. (Do I have that right? The generic name for Apple operating systems is OSX? ) I've commandeered my daughter-in-law's old Macbook which is one of the aluminum bodied ones with a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo and 4GB RAM. I've ordered an SSD (256 GB Crucial MX100 for $101 US - thanks Newegg!) and have bought a retail Snow Leopard DVD. (I like Apple's approach to OS sales too - $20 with free updates.)

Anyway... With this H/W is there any reason not to upgrade to Mountain Lion? I think I might need it to to take advantage of the latest dev tools, but since the H/W is a bit dated I thought I'd ask.

Are there any resources particularly oriented toward Linux users (refugees ) that would get an otherwise experienced user (Linux and some Windows) up to speed quickly. Though my intent is to work on IOS development, I plan to explore OSX in general. How can I not play with a shiny new toy

The last question involves the app ecosystem and particularly FOSS S/W. I haven't looked but expect to find stuff like LibreOffice and Chrome browser. Are there any OSX oriented projects that I should know about?

Lastly... Before removing the drive I tried to get to a terminal window since I'm pretty comfortable with the command line and I believe that the underlying OS for OSX is BSD. Is there a shell? Bash? Perl? Python? (I don't know Python ) C/C++? Java? I could not figure out how to do that.

Thanks!

Have you considered looking into running dual-boot on your sig system with Hackintosh?

Hank,

Your Macbook[pro?] will run Mountain Lion just fine, but you can upgrade straight to Mavericks, once you get all the updates for Snow Leopard.

I prefer Open Source programs over Apple's(sorry Apple guys) so I typically use Firefox, VLC, Gimp and Open Office; there's tons of open source software you can use with OS X:

http://opensourcemac.org/

https://www.apple.com/opensource/

http://sourceforge.net/directory/os:mac/freshness:recently-updated/

You mentioned doing development for IOS, idk but perhaps Xcode will come in handy:

https://developer.apple.com/xcode/

Edit- the terminal can be found in finder>Applications>Utilities

ATMINSIDE said:

Have you considered looking into running dual-boot on your sig system with Hackintosh?

Click to expand...

I gave alternatives like that some thought. The thing that put me off was Apples desire to tie OSX to their H/W. It struck me that this could result in a continuing effort to keep it going on non-Apple H/W. Also I feel like Apple did the right thing pricing their OS reasonably and in turn I thought I'd keep it on Apple H/W (though it means no additional H/W sale for Apple at this time.)

I would lean toward running it in a VM anyway. I've run dual boot Win/Linux and it was always a PITA to have to shut down Linux and boot Windows to do anything I could not accomplish on Linux.

I do plan to dual boot Linux and OSX on the MacBook.

ihrsetrdr said:

Hank,

Your Macbook[pro?] will run Mountain Lion just fine, but you can upgrade straight to Mavericks, once you get all the updates for Snow Leopard.


Edit- the terminal can be found in finder>Applications>Utilities

Click to expand...

Not a Pro (AFAIK) And yes, Mavericks... That's the one I was thinking of. I guess that Mountain Lion came to mind because the Apple store tried to sell me a upgrade for $20 when I ordered Snow Leopard.

Thanks for the tip on finding the shell. (On the older version it was running I'm not sure I found the menu. )

HankB said:

I do plan to dual boot Linux and OSX on the MacBook.

Click to expand...

You'll need a boot manager called rEFInd.

You'll need to resize your OS X partition to make free space for Linux; IIRC booting to your Snow Leopard disc and using the disk utility is one way. I was never much familiar with Boot Camp but if Snow Leopard has it then that might be a simple way to prepare for dual boot as well.

just FYI, it depends on the model of mac you have, certian models will not be able to run Mountian lion, Mavericks, and Yosemite. (aka you need a 64 bit EFI)

if your laptop is fully 64 bit efi then you can run ML

and dont fear OSX, its just FreeBSD with a frontend

I have been a Linux user for about 10 years (almost exclusively), and just switched to OSX a few months ago, and I love it.

It's essentially a UNIX system with a nice and intuitive UI (much better than GNOME or KDE).

BSD is reasonably similar to Linux. You just get BSD tools instead of GNU tools. For the most part they work the same way, but some of them have slightly different switches, etc.

By default you get a Bash shell, with LLVM as a C/C++ compiler (it's almost 100% compatible with GCC). You can very easily add other languages as well (Perl, Python, etc, etc). Just like on Linux.

The only downside is that OSX doesn't have something like APT. There are a few third party package management systems (I use homebrew), and they work pretty well, but the repositories aren't nearly as large as APT.

In exchange you get compatibility with a lot more commercial programs, though.

At this point I prefer OSX over Linux for personal use (though I still run Linux on my server, and my day job is mostly writing Linux kernel drivers for custom hardware).

Most FOSS programs do have OSX versions. I use most of the same set of applications on OSX as I did on Linux.

So far so good. The SSD came in today and I have just installed Snow Leopard without issue. It did require using the disk utility to partition the drive so I selected 160GB (of 256) for OSX and left the other unused. I was surprised nothing was asked about swap but I suspect that OSX uses a file within the system (like Windows and OS/2.)

I'm applying upgrades now and then I'll call it a night.

Thanks again for all of the tips. I did manage to open a terminal window and was pleased to find things like 'df' and 'top' (but no /etc/issue or /proc) so I'm starting to feel a little at home already.

If you have a 64-bit computer that can run virtual machines then Mountain Lions and Mavericks should be no problem. I've been running OSX as a virtual machine for YEARS... even on a laptop it works just fine.

rainless said:

If you have a 64-bit computer that can run virtual machines then Mountain Lions and Mavericks should be no problem. ...

Click to expand...

I'm not sure why I didn't pursue that more. At this point I'm interested in trying out a pure Apple experience. And FWIW, I'm pretty sure that running OSX on any H/W that is not sold by Apple violates the EULA. OTOH, the installation materials did mention resolving problems on a "Frankenmac." It also included a couple Apple stickers. I can't imagine any use for those other than to properly label a Frankenmac.

Still exploring OSX. I have so far not found the "Insert" key and am losing hope. I did figure out that most things done with the <ctrl> key are done with the <command> key.

I'm also still looking for the graphical disk usage display. Disk Utility gives me the same info I can get from 'df -H'.

Now I need to look into Homebrew so I can install smartmontools.

HankB said:

I'm not sure why I didn't pursue that more. At this point I'm interested in trying out a pure Apple experience. And FWIW, I'm pretty sure that running OSX on any H/W that is not sold by Apple violates the EULA. OTOH, the installation materials did mention resolving problems on a "Frankenmac." It also included a couple Apple stickers. I can't imagine any use for those other than to properly label a Frankenmac.

Still exploring OSX. I have so far not found the "Insert" key and am losing hope. I did figure out that most things done with the <ctrl> key are done with the <command> key.

I'm also still looking for the graphical disk usage display. Disk Utility gives me the same info I can get from 'df -H'.

Now I need to look into Homebrew so I can install smartmontools.

Click to expand...

Yeah it definitely violates the EULA, but it's debatable whether that clause of the EULA is enforceable or not (anti-competitive laws). It seems to depend on the country.

In Germany it has been successfully challenged, and now there are companies openly selling hackintosh computers with OSX pre-installed.

I didn't really miss Insert since I never used it, but lack of home/end is killing me.

Homebrew is pretty awesome.

cyberfish said:

I didn't really miss Insert since I never used it, but lack of home/end is killing me.

Click to expand...

I'm used to X copy/paste using the middle mouse button but there is none on the Macbook. Nor can I chord the left/right mouse buttons. An alternate is <shift><insert> to paste but there is no <insert>.

<home> and <end> would be useful too.

HankB said:

I'm used to X copy/paste using the middle mouse button but there is none on the Macbook. Nor can I chord the left/right mouse buttons. An alternate is <shift><insert> to paste but there is no <insert>.

<home> and <end> would be useful too.

Click to expand...

Yeah I never got used to middle mouse button copy/paste, so it wasn't so bad for me.

I do use shift-insert, though, and miss that on the terminal. Though alt-V works, unlike on Linux, so that's good.

I miss home/end especially because I am a programmer and need to do that like 200 times a day. On OSX it's Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E, but I'm still getting used to that.

In answering the OP's question, OS "X" means OS version ten...I imagine that snow leopard is some sub version of OS ten..probably something similar to OS X.01?
I think they gave up on the numbering scheme after the original OS X was released, and now just call their latest by the code name.. Which makes me wonder if there will ever be an OS 11?

DocClock aka MadClocker said:

I think they gave up on the numbering scheme after the original OS X was released, and now just call their latest by the code name.. Which makes me wonder if there will ever be an OS 11?

Click to expand...

Mavericks, the current version, is 10.9.4. (I guess they ran out of big cats. ) The Book of Knowledge lists Snow Leopard as 10.6 and the next release 10.10 (Yosemite.) Maybe some day they will crank it up to 11. Then it will be OS/XI. (OSexy? )

Anyway, OS/X has been a breath of fresh air compared to Windows. It's much closer to Linux than Windows. And it comes out of the box with bash and an X server (though I'm not sure why it needs an X server.)

Osexy....I love it...now that it (the idea) is out there in the wild, when some Apple exec sees your comment, they will not want to wait for OSXI to come out.

I can see the adds now, get seduced by OSXI

One recent adventure was setting up TimeMachine backups to my NFS server. Setting up TimeMachine in something other than iHardware is not for the faint of heart! But I think I have it working. Time stamps on my file server seem to be updating. However the output of 'df' is pretty much a total mystery to me.

The last line looks like a local mount but I think it is where the TimeMachine stores its backups. The NFS mount is on the previous line.

I still get unexpected results when scrolling around on a web page. Some times two fingers down causes all open programs to minimize and shoot off toward the edge of the screen (just like when pressing the <fn><f3> button.) Sometimes two fingers dragged right goes to the previous page and sometimes it just drags the page to the right whereupon it just bounces back. And all too often I go back rather than scroll down.