Mac OS X from a FreeBSD perspective

Andrew andrew.hodgson at blueyonder.co.uk
Tue May 13 21:26:05 BST 2003


> Sorry. But better to find out now than later.

Oh yes, absolutely. I didn't mean to sound ungrateful!!

>> 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.
>
Yes, of course - I should have qualified my statement. I meant there's 
no real resource locally for those more accustomed to Unix, explaining 
the precise relationship between Darwin, Aqua, the filesystem, etc. 
etc. These resources are online, I know. Just a minor gripe! Wouldn't 
it be nice to have all these docs with the install a la FreeBSD?

Thanks for the tip with development, although it'll be some time before 
I approach coding again. I was encouraged early on with LOGO (9 years 
old, on a Research Machines 380Z, which I loved dearly - I used to take 
the manual home as a kid) but as soon as I reached secondary the 
computer 'lab' was seemingly off-limits. Only now do I realise it was 
the 'operating system' that fascinated me so much, and that fascination 
has reappeared thanks to free Unix. (Maybe I should cross-post this to 
-advocacy?) I've looked at Python, maybe it'll give me the bug again.

I'm so glad I posted - you've probably saved me a lot of trouble. 
Thanks a lot.

Andrew





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