Mac OS X from a FreeBSD perspective

[Pete French]

> Ah ha, I think I may be heading for a reinstall......bugger.

Sorry. But better to find out now than later. I needed to reinstall
my powerbook anyway when it arrived (wrongly configured from Apple sadly)

> Thanks for the tips, I guess I should get reading. None of this stuff 
> seems to be explained locally, in Mac Help or anywhere else. I guess 
> that's why that book is called 'OS X - The Missing Manual'!  :-/

Havent seen that. The netinfo stuff should have man pages - or at least
it used to. Playing around with nidump and niload will show you the
basics - as well as looking in the netinfo manager app to see how
its *actually* stored. the dump/load commands fudge it into standard
UNIX foramt whereas in actual fact its more like a tree of name/value
pairs.

> You're right though, it's a great desktop interface, I'm loving it.

They have done a very good job (despite the moaning from both the classic
Mac and classic NeXT camps - though I still want scrollbards on the left!)

cheers,

-bat.

PS: If you are going to do any development work then I suggest you take a
look at GNUstep and especially the new library Renaissance. That has two
big advantgaes - first being it lets you develop under OSX using 'vi'
and 'make' from the command line without needing to fiddle with Apples dev
tools (which are in a wibbly wobbly world of their own). Secondly it lets
you write code, inclkdung user interfaces (thats what Renaissance does)
which will compile and run on OSX, Linux, FreeBSD etc... with no changes.
Just type 'make' and aday you go. The need to build separate UI objects for
each separate system used to haper doing this, but now it seems to work
beautifully. I've ported over mahy Apps and they all work fine under OSX
and also adopt the Aqua appearance automatically.