Running Mac OS X Panther 288
| Running Mac OS X Panther | |
| author | James Duncan Davidson |
| pages | 306 |
| publisher | O'Reilly |
| rating | 9 |
| reviewer | Matthew Leingang |
| ISBN | 0596005008 |
| summary | Managing your Mac as a unix box |
The book fills a certain niche very well. It is not the missing manual to the iApps or a list of Finder tricks. It's not a primer on Unix for people used to GUIs and Macs (that's Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther , also from O'Reilly). This book is for users who have administered a machine or network before and want to get the absolute most out of their Mac. It's also useful for connecting your Mac to a network seamlessly. But it's complicated and technical enough if you're the kind of Mac user who doesn't have the Terminal on your dock you might be intimidated. That may not include most slashdot readers, but it's worth mentioning because part of the Mac ideology is that it works beautifully with little trouble. The Unix ideology, however, is also represented: if want to tweak it, you can.
The author illustrates both interfaces to the operating system throughout the book. There are Macintosh applications to access all kinds of system information, whether it's users and groups, preferences, system logs, or services. For those who love Unix and the command line, just about anything you can do with the GUI you can do with the CLI. This makes a nice two-tiered approach to anything you'll want to do. The GUI is fast and easy to learn, but some things (particularly automated tasks) really need to be done on the command line.
The book is written well, and if you happen to be sitting next to your computer while reading it, you'll be constantly torn between the two. There are lots of things you'll want to try right away.
Part I: Getting Started
This part has a charming history of the Macintosh, from the toaster to Panther, complete with snapshots (my favorite parts of these are the disk usage indicators: System Folder: 152K in folder, 167K available.) It's fun to read and discover where on the time line you came into the fold.
Here also is a basic layout of the filesystem, containing parts used by the more Macintosh-y side and the more Unix-y side. For instance, there are several directories (um, folders) called Library; these contain information which might be in an include, share, etc, or lib directory. Better put, these contain supplemental Mac-app-related, non-user data. For Unix applications, the /usr, /var, /bin, /sbin, /etc, are all there.
Of course, there are top-level places to store things, or user-level locations for essentially the same kind of data (applications, preferences, documentation). This is the concept of filesystem domains, which additionally include network and system domains. The whole idea is to allow customization to ordinary users without giving up system integrity and preventing all users from unintentionally corrupting things.
If you haven't used the CLI on the Mac before, the author gives a basic introduction to Terminal.app. Terminal by default uses the bash shell, but there are number of ways to change that if you want. Several text editors are available for editing through the terminal, but unfortunately, the author doesn't talk much about them. True, pico is self-explanatory and vi and emacs users will already have their followers, but a little more than how to exit these programs if they start accidentally (while that's quite useful information) would have been helpful.
There's important extra structure to Mac files that can be (accidentally or intentionally) unlinked on the Unix side. There are commands like ditto, CpMac and MvMac which take care of the important stuff and do exactly what their GUI counterparts do (and more than mv and cp). Also, there's open which is the analog of double-clicking (either apps or docs), and osascript which lets you write and run AppleScript scripts on the fly. More could have been said here about the differences between Mac files and Unix files. What of the resource fork?
Part II: Essentials
This is where the book's meat is. There is first a blow-by-blow account of what happens when you turn on your Mac. If you are interested in seeing all the gory details, you can always hold down Propeller-V during startup and see the BSD diagnostics (even if you don't know what these mean, it's nice to know some progress is being made. Though I love the taste of Mac Kool-aid, I often worry what's going on while that dial is spinning). You can change how the Mac boots by updating (at your peril, as usual) the Open Firmware settings on the chip with nvram. One nice bit of customization from Bell-and-Whistle Land: the graphic shown at boot time is in /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemStarter/QuartzDisplay.bundle/Resources/BootPanel.pdf. The /etc/hostconfig file has Unix-style host configuration information, such as what services get turned on.
Creating your own startup items is relatively easy; it's a matter of putting a directory, shell script, and plist file in /Library/StartupItems. You can also customize what happens after a successful startup. You can present a login window, auto-login as a specific user, or even allow dropping down to console login.
The larger and more powerful a computer gets, the more people want or need to use it, and the more important it is to make sure each user area remains separate. At the Mac lab at which I worked during college in the early nineties, we used RevRDist to make sure every computer in the lab mirrored one with just the right software, fonts, and windows in the right place. The Mac from which we mirrored was locked in the office, not to be touched. Now there are much easier ways to do this without wasting a computer.
It's easy to create and manage users using the the Accounts preference panel. The root user exists, but is essentially not needed. The person who installs the operating system becomes an administrative user, and can bestow that privilege on other users. On the command line, all administrative tasks can be done with sudo, which requires authentication as an administrative user to run, but which contains a slight memory so that passwords don't need to be typed at every command. Although it's discouraged, you can allow the root user to log in.
With the several filesystem domains, each user can manage his or her own preferences. Each application allows access to its own preferences, or they can be taken care of from the command line with the defaults utility. GUI means it's easy to do what you want without knowing exactly what setting to change; CLI means you can automate it easily.
Another important aspect of a multi-user system is in permissions. Like in any good unix, in Mac OS X files have permissions attached to them indicating whether the owner, other users in the owner's group, or all users are allowed to see, edit, or run them. This can be managed through the Finder (with the Get Info menu command), or with the command line with chmod.
Several applications in the /Applications/Utilities folder allow you to keep track of what's running on your Mac. The author demonstrates these:
- System Profile, which shows information about your system's hardware and software. You can use this to check out who made your hard drive and how much RAM you have. Also, every application installed in /Applications is registered here, so you can easily see what versions of which are there.
- Console is another great utility for monitoring your applications. It collects log files from /Library/Logs, /var/log, and ~/Library/Log in a tree for browsing. You can filter views of these logs easily, making this a little more pleasant than tail -f.
- To monitor processes themselves you can use Activity Monitor. Think of it as top on Macintosh Steroids. You can inspect processes to try and figure out what they're doing or kill them if they've stopped accepting input. For super users and developers, you can sample processes to figure out their inner workings. There is probably FMTYEWTK about processes, but it's good know it's there.
- To terminate processes, there's the Force Quit command from the Apple menu, or you can do it through Activity Monitor, or there's good old-fashioned kill.
At the core of the Mac filesystem lies, of course, the filesystem. The Mac OS X Extended Filesystem (HFS+) is powerful yet friendly. It's case-preserving and case-insensitive. The latter means that README and Readme are the same file, but the former means that your original name for the file will be kept without enforcement of case usage. So if you want to call it ReAdMe, that's oK, too.
One of the most powerful features of HFS+ is journaling. This means every change to the file system is kept track of in the event of a system crash. This causes a slight overhead but pays benefits in automatic recovery from crashes without having to run fsck (or be scolded by your computer for its own crash). Fragmentation is also handled smartly; files smaller than 20MB are moved so as to have less than 8 fragments.
Lots of other disk-related activities are covered, including:
- how to mount filesystems of other types, including CDs and DVDs, Apple Filing Protocol, Samba, NFS, WebDAV and FTP;
- The Disk Utility application and its CLI cousin diskutil which do as much as you would want and more with a disk utility. You can check, repair, partition, erase and format any disks. You can even obliterate data by writing over it eight times with random data. Take that, NSA!
- disk images, which are like 21st century tarballs. A disk image contains not only data but its own filesystem, and are mounted onto the user's filesystem just like disks. In addition, disk images can be encrypted to restrict access without a password.
Part III: Advanced Topics
The further along in the book, the less useful it gets. That speaks not the author's skill of exposition or choice of subject matter, but simply confidence in the Mac and the knowledge that I didn't need to know it. For the user administering a single machine, there's no real need to grok the inner workings of Open Directory: it just works. Printing, network services: it all just works. That's good news for Mac users. But it's also good that all this information is available if you really do want to tweak default behavior or configure something that isn't working as it should.
I talked about this book with the systems administrator in my department, and he mentioned that my statements in the previous paragraph are somewhat simplistic. According to him, it was a hard task to have public Mac workstations which mounted home directories from a central Unix computer, and allowed users to have their own preferences and user data (including Dock setups) live in their Unix accounts. Apparently the book that has all the information about networking, warts and all, hasn't been written yet. This book is as good as it gets, so far.
To summarize this part of the book: Open Directory has nothing to do with the filesystem directory. Instead, it's the central location of all authentication information. At one time Unix maintained user information in flat files such as /etc/passwd and /etc/group; with the advent of larger networks that regime has been largely replaced. Open Directory is a liaison between BSD's Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAMs) and Mac's Directory Services on the local end, and LDAP, Rendevous, Kerberos, etc., on the network end. Open Directory can talk to Active Directory as well, to allow authentication across Windows and Mac platforms. Through network (shared domain) authentication, users can log in on networked machines while their names and passwords are stored on a central server. The Directory Access Utility is the tool for this.
NetInfo is the database behind Open Directory. As usual, there are two ways to manage Netinfo information; the GUI NetInfo Manager, and nicl on the command line.
Mac OS X uses CUPS (Common Unix Printing Service) to configure and access printing. The printing chapter shows how to add and manage printers using the Printer Setup Utility, and how to customize jobs with the various settings in the standard print dialog. Like I said, though, printing is much easier than it sounds from this chapter. Rendezvous and Open Directory find the printers you're allowed to print on; you click Print and go.
Networking and network services are also covered here. The author shows not only the theory behind networking, but the settings which allow one computer on a network to find another on another network through the internet. Once this is accomplished, a number of services can be deployed, from FTP to remote login to a personal web site.
Appendices
There's some useful stuff in the back, including how to install Panther from scratch (but especially what needs to be backed up before you do so!), all those boot key combos you can never remember, and a whole list of other resources, be they books, magazines, web sites, or mailing lists.
Check out this book if you want to learn the gory details of Mac OS X's core. It's short on gimmicks but long on information.
You can purchase Running Mac OS X Panther from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Its a good book. (Score:1, Informative)
bn.com? (Score:5, Informative)
The awesome Bookpool [bookpool.com] has it for $22.75.
Excellent free resource... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Excellent free resource... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Tiger (Score:5, Informative)
The book isn't a year late, the review is. I've had this book since February of this year. The date of the book is December 2003.
Re:Tiger is just around the corner... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually Video Conferencing using iChat has been around for a long while (I make use of it every day talking to relatives around the globe who although may not be the most technoliterate are easily capable of using iChat). The big difference in Tiger is that you can Video Multiconference - ie have a multi user video conference.
The GUI displays it as a sort of black marble table affair with beautiful reflections and an elegance which is breathtaking - not to mention the fact that using the H.264 codec they can render massive resolution video feeds from 3 other users and the feed from your own iSight/DVcam.
Check it out [apple.com]
Re:Max OS X is great, but... (Score:2, Informative)
Command-F : Fullscreen
That's also accessible via the 'Movie' menubar
You can also choose "present on screen" from the same menu.
Re:Max OS X is great, but... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:RISC vs CISC? (Score:2, Informative)
As far as the bottleneck, I'd venture to guess that it's probably poor optimization. It MIGHT be driver related, nVidia might be behind in their Mac drivers. Eh, who knows...
QuickTime /does/ play fullscreen, actually (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Max OS X is great, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Quicktime definitely does do fullscreen. What doesn't is the free version of Apple's Quicktime player - though for $25 US you get fullscreen and a lot more handy features.
There are many free alternatives though -- such as, but not limited to MPlayer [mplayerhq.hu] and VideoLAN [videolan.org] which are two very fine players.
As far as missing applications, I've had yet to be unable to find alternatives to what I use in the PC world, so without further specific examples, you won't get much help. In fact, even if there is a program only available for PC, VirtualPC [microsoft.com] or Remote Desktop Connection Client [microsoft.com] solves that problem completely for me.
I've always used Win and Mac OS (since Win3.1 and OS 7 anyway) and the only major annoyance on the OS X side is when I keep hitting CONTROL+C to copy on my Mac after working on the Windows box for prolonged periods of time.
I won't even bother to list all my annoyances with Windows
Re:A Tiger by any other name (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Max OS X is great, but... (Score:2, Informative)
That said I do have 2 pcs at home, one running windows XP and the other running Debian. For some of the more obvious annoyances between my mac and windows pc (fink [sourceforge.net] and apple's X11 actually give me most of the capabilities of my Debian box):
1) many websites (large corporations, including many banks) are optimized for windows and will not display properly in Safari or IE for mac (no longer supported by Microsoft). This can be overcome if you happen to run Microsoft's Virtual PC, which will run XP and therefore a compatible IE.
2)I do not like iPhoto's categorizing my digital photos. I have yet to find a good program for the mac (I use Firehand Ember [firehand.com] on my PC)
3)Which brings me to another point, there is a lot more shareware out there for Windows (however, if you are proficient with Unix, many of these types of applications have already been written for Unix and can be compiled on OS X given a little time).
4)If you need to have all the shiny new software out there, then the mac is not for you. An example is Gmail. It only recently began supporting Safari and there is still no Gmail notifier for OS X (although there are some nifty Gmail widgets out there for Konfabulator [konfabulator.com]).
5)Upgrading is more often than not a problem. Don't think that you can head off to CompUSA and buy a new video card for your new G5 tower. Memory is really the only readily upgradeable component in an apple (and this is only a recent addition). Many apples leave you stuck with what you bought (I do not really see this as a big problem as I like to upgrade to a completely new system every 2 years or so anyways).
6)People will salivate all over your new computer. So if you have OCD don't buy a new mac.
If you are heavy into windows and need to use Microsoft Access or other windows only apps extensively, don't think that virtual PC will be your savior if you buy a mac. In this case stick with Windows for these things. However, if you are just waffling because you can not think of what you "might" be missing, just jump in and go buy a new 1.33GHz iBook, you will not be disappointed. I myself will always use a macintosh, not being a PC gamer and now that I have the command line and X11 I may never use anything else.
Re:Tiger (Score:1, Informative)
Now, it's a book about Tiger (10.4) that we'd need.
This is about darwin the core, not the Aqua Gui. Tiger are mostly Aqua and application differences. The core is basically the same.
Re:RISC vs CISC? (Score:3, Informative)
128 MB with WoW *and* MacOS X? You should have at *least* 512 MB, preferably more.
Re:RISC vs CISC? (Score:5, Informative)
The bottleneck is OpenGL on the Mac.
Check out www.x-plane.com and you'll see mentioned of the author having some issues with really low frame-rate on his new scenery for version 8 of X-plane. (The scenery is brutal. But it runs on a PC, and kills a Dual processor G5.).
I looked into it a bit and it looks like Apple's implementation allocates too much memory and causes thrashing (in memory) if the Display Lists are too large. I suspect it is the same reason iD hasn't released Doom III for the Mac, simply put the current OpenGL code cannot push that much data.
Re:Max OS X is great, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Hit command (the apple button)-tab to cycle through programs and command-tilde (~) to cycle through windows in a particular program. Command and the direction of an arrow left, right up or down will bring you to the end of lines, right and left, or the end of a field, up or down. That might be part of the "strange tangle" you describe, but I've found that I don't have to take my hands off the keyboard often.
Re:Take that Apple??? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Max OS X is great, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Then there are the games...but I don't really miss those. The ones I would be inclined to play (Doom III, Neverwinter Nights, Worms 3D) have Mac ports (although my lowly G3 won't run them).
Lastly, my biggest pet peeve is that new versions of Java are almost always 6 months to a year behind the Solaris/Linux/Windows release from Sun. I would really like to start messing with 1.5/5.0, but it won't be out until Tiger is released.
That's it, really; everything else is gravy. I have Firefox 1.0, Mail.app, iTunes, MPlayer OS X (which is fantastic, btw), Netbeans, Eclipse, Tomcat, Postgres, MySQL, Open Office, SNES 9X, Bittorrent (or Azureus), Gimp, and so on and so forth. I haven't regretted my decision at all since switching 3 years ago.
(Incidentally, Quicktime will display full-screen if you pay for the pro version ($30). I use MPlayer OS X instead, because it's free, faster, and plays many more formats. There's also VideoLan Client, which is more robust but slower and more resource intensive. I have no idea what is meant by "extended desktop".)
- Jesse
Re:3 days ago (Score:3, Informative)
Re:RISC vs CISC? (Score:3, Informative)
iD hasn't released Doom III for the Mac yet because Aspyr [aspyr.com] is. Why iD isn't doing there own port though, is beyond me.
Re:iBooks can span, with a wee OF hack... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Max OS X is great, but... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, it does. The functionality to play movies fullscreen is there, only the menu is disabled for the free version. Use AppleScript to access it.
on open FileName
tell application "QuickTime Player"
activate
open FileName
present movie 1
end tell
end open
present movie 1 means fullscreen mode.
Re:Tiger (Score:4, Informative)
Some misplaced optimism... (Score:2, Informative)
Uh... hrm.. maybe not.
More machines are being sold (provided Apple delivers themmm but that's another story). But in terms of market share, it's gone down drasticaly recently (it's overing just around 2% from 4% five years ago).
This means that the number of PC unis being sold (Dell, Gateway etc) has risen more than Apple.
There are more Mac users. But the market share hasn't increased.
Re:Max OS X is great, but... (Score:2, Informative)
Here's a handy AppleScript droplet that will give you full-screen QT movies
on open fileName
tell application "QuickTime Player"
open fileName
present movie 1
end tell
end open
Save it as an Application to make it a droplet. Drop your movie on it and
Re:The "lag" time (Score:4, Informative)
switch programs: ALT+TAB
switch windows w/in a program: ALT+~
show all windows: F9
show current app windows: F10
I have no delete key.
on a mac laptop, pressing Fn+DELETE (the key typically called backspace on a PC that is labeled delete on a mac) will delete the characters in front of the cursor, similar to pressing DEL on a pc
It's the little things like having a scroll section on my trackpad that I miss.
http://gnufoo.org/ucontrol/ucontrol.html
http: