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Apple Businesses

How Unix-like is MacOS X? 128

Posted by Cliff from the discussing-the-core-of-the-latest-apple dept.
prospective_user asks: "I am a heavy user of Unix, spend most of my time running Linux and am considering getting myself an iBook, after seeing a considerable amount of exposure Macs/Apple have in both Slashdot and the O'Reilly Network. Given that MacOS X is based on FreeBSD/Mach, I suppose that the usual Unix libraries and environments (like ncurses and tcl/tk) are available in MacOS X (which I hope is true, for text-based applications). In fact, I'm concerned about the Unix side of MacOS X and also plan on running Debian/PPC on it, but I plan to primarily use MacOS X. So, before having an (uncertain) investment in a new platform, it would be reasonable to have a bit more of background on it and thus, the questions: how well does MacOS X support traditional Unix applications? For instance, how do the following applications run under MacOS X (which I use the most): teTeX, GNU Emacs, mutt and fetchmail?" Note that the submittor isn't asking if OSX is or is not a Unix; we've fielded that question already. No, the question here is where does OSX differ from the other unicies.

"Also regarding the investment in a new platform and coming from the x86 world, I'm a bit interested about the PowerPC performance in comparison to what I could get with a x86 notebook. I've read some articles and pages that suggest that PowerPCs may not be fast (or, in fact, may be quite slower than their x86 counterparts):

Some of the sources I've read are: these pages, from D. J. Bernsteins's website, and this article on processor performance from the GMP website.

Also, as some later questions, can the portable Macs be plugged to non-mac monitors? And does MacOS X feature a packet filter like Linux or other BSDs do?

Any comments and experiences with these machines are welcome. Thanks."
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How Unix-like is MacOS X? More

How Unix-like is MacOS X?

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  • why not ask apple? (Score:3, Informative)

    by rebug ( 520669 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @07:09PM (#2879019)
    http://developer.apple.com/macosx/ [apple.com]

    all you need to know.
  • As far as I understand, with the help of the amazing "fink" you are able to compile pretty much every *nix app to OS X. Therefor it is as much Unix as you want to.
    • You know, I've never understood the need for things like that. I've built vim and tcpdump and lots of other goodies from source with no problems whatsoever. These "pre-packaged" apps may be handy for people who can't type "make && make install", but you've gotta wonder why such people would be using unix apps in the first place.
      • pre-packaged applications are nice when you trust the 'producer' of the package to both not be putting a trojan on your box, and to compile with options you either like or are willing to put up with.

        it saves compile time, and probably download time as well (depending on the package of course.... for example linux source > 10 meg tar.gz (or bzip2 if you insist), linux compiled 1 meg (in general))

        in my opinion, open source is about having the option to compile stuff yourself, which doesn't mean you have to

    • Re:as much as you want to (Score:3, Informative)

      by Xenex ( 97062 )
      Fink lives at http://fink.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net] for the record.

      Mmm, apt. Mmm, dselect.

  • Not very Unixlike at all, I'm afraid. (Score:4, Troll)

    by Starship Trooper ( 523907 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @07:15PM (#2879059) Homepage Journal
    I too looked forward to the day my iBook came when I ordered. I would no longer have to sift through the duality of Linux's raw power and Windows' ubiquity and application support: I would have the best of both worlds! When I first plugged the iBook in and eagerly opened Terminal.app, I was pleased to be greeted by the lovely '%' tcsh prompt. 'ls' worked. 'du' worked. 'ifconfig' worked. Even "find . -name *.c -exec grep -l '{}' ';'" worked!

    But as I dug deeper, the initial euphoria wore off. While MacOS X gives the impression of being a Unix, as one digs deeper into the system, it becomes more and more clear that it is anything but Unix:

    • No /etc. Well, technically, there is a /etc, but it is incredibly empty compared to what you may be used to in FreeBSD or Linux. None of the system's configuration is included in standard POSIX text files; Apple has opted to move everything into what they call a "NetInfo" registry. This is awful, to say the least. Obviously, Apple has failed to learn anything from the problems Microsoft's reliance on a central registry have propagated, and it wasn't long before I ended up having to reinstall MacOS X due to a corruption of the NetInfo database.
    • Not everything is a file. MacOS X violates this essential tenet of the Unix interface by hiding the implementation of several core functions such as keyboard and mouse I/O behind a "CoreGraphics" ObjC library. There is no /dev/mouse or /dev/kbd or any of the easy-to-use device nodes I've grown accustomed to coding for on Linux.
    • Everything above the Unix layer is proprietary. The Unix world on MacOS X is completely separate from the GUI world. The Unix directories are completely hidden from the Finder, and likewise one cannot start GUI apps from the console. There is none of the tight CLI-GUI integration seen in AmigaOS or BeOS or even Windows.
    If you're looking for Unix, I suggest you make room on your iBook's drive for Linux, which runs very well on Mac hardware, and is much faster than MacOS X to boot. I'm afraid all of MacOS X's vaunted Unixness is little more than FUD.
    • Hear Hear. I thoroughly agree with the three bullet points in the previous post; may I add my 2 cents?

      Even after 10 months of OS X, you might be less than dissapointed if you're indeed looking for an operating environment that behaves like what you're used to (say, on BSD or Linux).

      My main gripe with OS X was when I upgraded from 10 to 10.1, all my build tools were broken, and I had to bite my lip and wait for Apple's Developer's Kit fix. That sort of thing doesn't happen while using Linux (not yet, to me anyway).

      Try writing a device driver? (can't do PCMCIA or IR yet, thanks Apple). On a _unixy_ system,
      write a file or two, include library headers and functions, toss a compiler in, you're all set. Under OS X, it's such a curcuituous wild goose chase.

      My conclusion: OS X has pretty graphics, apps, and a generally useful programming environment (I mean editor, command line, cc, ld; not that ProjectBuilder); but if you really want to do something other than puttering around in the command line, you will be less than impressed. (I don't know much about Solaris, so I can't say anything about being able to fiddle with it the way you can Linux, ?BSD?, Minix, et al.

    • Re:Not very Unixlike at all, I'm afraid. (Score:5, Informative)

      by self assembled struc ( 62483 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @07:40PM (#2879235) Homepage
      Actually, you can open up GUI apps from the console.

      try "man open" at the command prompt.

      and from what the guy was asking originally, i've had no problems running GNU software. I got BASH to compile and set it up as default shell, i've gotten VI to compile, and GNU Emacs seems to run just fine (even m-x tetris is available).

      The CLI is a different world from the GUI, but you can turn on all most options to allow the finder to see hidden directories, the whole nine yards. Check out some Mac tip and trick sites...Admittedly it's not default in the OS and you have to peek around, but come on, y'all like UNIX, so why get lazy about learning the tricks of this system.

    • Re:Not very Unixlike at all, I'm afraid. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by foobar104 ( 206452 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @07:43PM (#2879265) Journal
      I'm afraid all of MacOS X's vaunted Unixness is little more than FUD.

      OS X is based on Darwin, which is a full-fledged Unix kernel that complies with every relevant standard: POSIX, XPG, you name it. Because of this fact, software written within those standards compiles and runs with no problems.

      Just this morning I wanted to download some big ISOs to my iMac at home while I was away; why waste that expensive DSL line just 'cause I'm not at home? So I logged in to my iMac with SSH and used NcFTP to download the source code for GNU Screen from the GNU FTP site. Then it was "configure && make && sudo make install." At that point, I was able to run "screen" and use a detached terminal session from the office to download my ISOs.

      If that's not pretty damn Unix-like, I don't know what is.

      Of course, that doesn't mean OS X is just like Solaris, or HP-UX, or IRIX, or FreeBSD, or Linux any more than those OSs are all like each other. The definition of "Unix-like" is defined by a set of standards, and OS X meets 'em.

      You're talking about how different OS X is from your expectations, not how it fits the definition of "Unix." They're not the same thing.

      Also, I don't think "FUD" means what you think it means.

      • Re:Not very Unixlike at all, I'm afraid. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Chanc_Gorkon ( 94133 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <nokrog>> on Monday January 21, 2002 @10:57PM (#2880112)
        I agree with you. For that matter, AIX (which is a UNIX for all intents and purposes....) does something similar with it's implementation of UNIX. All AIX config is done in SMITTY or SMIT (both GUI and a ASCII terminal driven) and all config is stored in the ODM Database. Sure, you can make changes and changes that work to the standard /etc text files, but those changes are lost when you reboot/IPL. I believe IBM still calls a reboot an IPL even under AIX....amazing how many mainframish like things are throughout AIX....program fixes are called PTF's in both AIX, OS/390 (or whatever MVS is now called) and DOS/VSE. In any case, who gives a crap where thigns are stored/configged? I mean even the Linux guys can't all decide on where to store what. Desktops do they go in /usr or /opt? GRUB stores it's config in /boot/grub/menu.lst .....LILO stores it's info in /etc/lilo.conf. Grub you can make a change and reboot. Lilo you must run lilo after updating a kernel or get lilililiii. The things that makes a machine UNIX like, to me, is how you interface with it and not how close to a "standard" which doesn't really seem to exist between even true UNIX machines. Can you SSH into a OSX based machine and run tcsh/bash/ksh or whatever and then run a text based FTP client and download source, compile it, then do whetever and as another poster already said, run it. You can. You can download just abut any Linux source code and get it to compile (well, that's what I have heard anyway.....). Sure, a Carbonized or Cocoa app looks great and may not be a true "UNIX" type of app, but what about a GNOME or KDE app? Are they more UNIXy? I think not.

    • Re:Not very Unixlike at all, I'm afraid. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Dr. Sp0ng ( 24354 ) <mspong.gmail@com> on Monday January 21, 2002 @07:47PM (#2879290) Homepage
      The Unix directories are completely hidden from the Finder

      No they're not. There's an option - it MAY be "Show hidden files" or something to that effect, but I'm pretty sure it's not. I'm not at my OS X box right now so I can't check. It can be done, though.

      Now, as for your gripes about /etc, all I can say is THANK GOD! OS X is great for one reason only - they took Unix, dumped all the crap, and kept all the good stuff. It's Unix, how it was meant to be done. No more worrying about hundreds of apps, each with their own configuration mechanism - it all goes through Apple's (NeXT's) APIs and is stored as XML.

      and likewise one cannot start GUI apps from the console.

      Try the "open" command.

    • Same complaints, 12 years later. (Score:5, Informative)

      by green pizza ( 159161 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @07:49PM (#2879300) Homepage
      These are the exact same complaints aired in 1988 when the first NeXT machines shipped with NeXTstep 1.0. I agree with everything you've said. But keep in mind, Mac OS X is its own funky flavor of unix for a reason. I just wish NetInfo was optional. NI is a dream on a large NI network (I used to help admin 320 NeXTstations across our Math department), but it's a pain for someone that doesn't need its offerings.

      Ignorance or Evolution? It's hard to say. But I can tell you I've been happy with Mac OS X thus far. Final Cut Pro 3.0 works perfectly. My digital cameras (USB still photo and FireWire MiniDV) integrate fine. OmniWeb 4.1 is looking to be a great new browser (plans for 4.2/5.0 are sounding awesome). And yet I can still run all of the goodies I'm accustom to on my Sun and my Linux box.

      That said, OS X is not for someone who wants Linux in the first place. If you want the X Window System, if you want GTK or Qt, if you want GNOME/KDE/etc... do yourself a favor and build a Linux box. Running these under OS X is possible, but a kluge.

      Mac OS X is a whole new world. Learn its ways and tools, compute with peace.

      Hope this helps.

    • Re:Not very Unixlike at all, I'm afraid. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @08:43PM (#2879605) Homepage Journal

      No /etc. Well, technically, there is a /etc, but it is incredibly empty compared to what you may be used to in FreeBSD or Linux. None of the system's configuration is included in standard POSIX text files; Apple has opted to move everything into what they call a "NetInfo" registry. This is awful, to say the least.

      Why is this a bad idea? The concept of a system registry is fantastic in theory; in practice, on Microsoft's operating systems, it is a trainwreck. Why must Apple's attempt immediately be classified as such, as well? Do you honestly think managing 100 different little config files in /etc, each with its own syntax and gotchas, is somehow more elegant than a registry-based solution? The registry is something I wish some Linux distro would get around to doing, to be honest, and one of the few good ideas Microsoft has ever had.

      - A.P.

      • Binary registry is probably more prone to corruption. Although it should be faster than parsing text-based config, say XML.

        • Re:Not very Unixlike at all, I'm afraid. (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Yeah binary databases are corruption prone -- that's why all of the terabyte-sized database systems use flat text files. Thanks for your insight.

          Think about your statement. One binary registry was prone to corruption, the one in Windows. (and I suspect that has much more to do with the crappy FAT filesystem than their registry code)
          • binary databases are corruption prone -- that's why all of the terabyte-sized database systems use flat text files. Thanks for your insight.

            I think the original poster phrased that incorrectly..

            Flat text files are no more prone to corruption than binary ones - but when it DOES become corrupt, you can fix a text file with VI, or any other text editor.
      • The concept of a system registry is fantastic in theory; in practice, on Microsoft's operating systems, it is a trainwreck. Why must Apple's attempt immediately be classified as such, as well? Do you honestly think managing 100 different little config files in /etc, each with its own syntax and gotchas, is somehow more elegant than a registry-based solution?

        Plain text files are good. You can view them with just about any utility (cat, less, more), you can grep from them easily, you can echo >> them, etc. Plain text is sort of a universal interface that is easy to manipulate, and easy to write your own tools to manipulate (using PERL, for example).

        Now, taking that away in order to have a binary registry that has exactly one painful tool to manipulate is like highway robbery. No remote admin, not easy write your own utils, etc. Just crap.

        Plain text configs are just plain easy to learn and to admin. Putting them all in the same file doesn't change much - making them binary and forcing you to use the RegEdit program of your OS provider is crippling to an admin.
        • There are API's on the Windows's plateform for all of this. You can even all these aPI's from Perl if you want to. Get a clue before you complain.
          • There are API's on the Windows's plateform for all of this

            No, there isn't.

            Text file -> editor

            WinRegistry -> custom program to extract to text -> editor -> custom program to replace -> Winregistry

            If your system is hosed with the first one, you load up your rescue floppy, use VI on the text file, and you're done.

            If your system is hosed with the second one, your system is hosed. All the APIs in the world won't fix it, because the system has to boot before you can use them.
          • That doesn't take away from my point.

            Plain text ALREADY has enormous sets of tools available to modify it, including every text editor, parser, etc. There is not one tool that is critical (and in this case you can note the tool is the Windows library to access the Registry).

            Sort of a least common denominator. You can spill the text file into a console with cat, view it and edit it with Notepad, or vi, or Word, or whatever you like to use to edit text. You can do this all remotely with ease.

            Certainly all of this can be done with a binary registry IF the OS provides you the tools. But you still lose a lot of common function by migrating away from plain text, and it remans to be seen what gain, if any, comes from not having a plain text registry. I think the only real change is that the OS provider CONTROLS EXACTLY how you can interact with the Registry, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your opinion.

        • Now, taking that away in order to have a binary registry that has exactly one painful tool to manipulate is like highway robbery. No remote admin, not easy write your own utils, etc. Just crap.

          Actually, not only can you connect to remote machines (more or less--the domain) using the graphical tool provided from another workstation, you can ssh into the machine you want to admin, and use command line tools (dwrite and friends) to change NI. Also, the API is available (or at least it used to be) so you can write your own tools.

        • I realize that probably no one will read this (too old) but I can't let this slide.


          OS X configuration files are plain text. They're XML formatted, but you can edit them by hand as easily as any .ini or fstab.

      • Depends, for system wide configs, having /etc/ entries makes backups for individual services/programs much easier, though I guess most people don't need that, in which case a registry is ok.

        Using a registry for user setting, though, is a PITA, IMHO. Nothing beats the unix method of '.' files/directories in the users home directory interms of KISS-ness. You can very easy backup your settings, copy them to a different machine, or try out a friends settings, etc, all on a per program basis. A registry (esp Windows registry), makes it very difficult to do such a thing.

        For example, I've been using the same .emacs file now for 5+ years now on a ton of different machines (solaris, linux, HP-Ux - at school, home and work). In the same time, I've had to reconfigure Office to my liking a countless number of times.

      • IMHO, an XML registry could work fairy well. Example:

        <key name=""><key name=system><int name=version value=1>

        etc...

    • The Unix directories are completely hidden from the Find

      This is an option. You can turn the hiding of the Unix directories on and off. It's off by default.

      likewise one cannot start GUI apps from the console.

      This is just plain wrong. There exists a utility called open (/usr/bin/open). To open something, simply run it with the path to whatever you want to run.

      ie: open ./iTunes.app

      There is none of the tight CLI-GUI integration seen in AmigaOS or BeOS or even Windows.

      Bah, just look at the consumer Apple is marketing to. They don't even want to see the CLI. Apple is attempting to make it possible for people to use the environment efficiently without a person ever having to use a shell.

    • No /etc? There are 72 files in my MacOS X 10.1.2's /etc. Why so little? /etc/rc.* was moved to a new structure in /System/Library/StartupItems (and 3rd party in /Library..), which has 380 files.

      As far as NetInfo goes, it's just like the NIS your familiar with on other UNIX's. (and can be hooked into NIS or LDAP). In fact, everything in NetInfo, except for maybe printers, is found in NIS. And if you don't think NIS is UNIX-like, you've never ran more than 3 machines.

      As far as the other two, others have countered that.
    • Besides "open" from the shell, if you drag any Finder item to a terminal window, it inserts the text of its pathname.

      Also, maybe the reason why everything is not viewed as a file under Mac OS X is because not everthing is a file in reality.
    • There is none of the tight CLI-GUI integration seen in AmigaOS or BeOS or even Windows

      Depends on what you mean by "tight CLI-GUI integration." With the AppleScript do shell commend, or Realbasic's shell method, you can write GUI wrappers for CLI commends.

      For example, I wrote a Realbasic program that calls TeTeX's texexec macro for combining PDF's. Now I can drag and drop PDF files onto an icon, and out pops my concatenated PDF

    • I don't know what /etc you're looking at:

      ls /etc | wc -l returns 67 items. That's less than my FreeBSD machine, but the latter has many .bak/.orig files any a few I've added since install. Additionally, though some files you may expect to find under MacOSX aren't there, you can create them to suit your needs (For example, tcpd, the TCP Wrapper is present, but /etc/hosts.allow is not by default.)

      There's no /dev/mouse or /dev/kdb. Yes it "violates a tenet", but the mouse and keybard haven't suddently become difficult to use because of it (which you claim.)

      Yes, everything above the kernel is propreitary. I don't see the connection between openness and level of integration. Carbon/Cocoa/Quartz/Aqua could be GPL and still not have a lick of integration. That was a poor choice of words on your part.

      Windows hardley has CLI-GUI integration. What does that even mean? Just because you can start something with a command? Again, poor choice of words...but as someone pointed out, you _can_ open apps (or files even) from the CLI. The "open" command performs the equivalent of a double-click (or Command-O in the Finder). 'open Mail.app" opens Mail, and 'open foo.mp3' opens foo.mp3 in iTunes.

      Lastly, you misuse FUD. Not only is MacOSX's Unixness just as is vaunted, but even if it weren't, the words "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt" would not in anyway describe the situation. Misleading Commercial Hype maybe. But it's moot. It's perfectly Unixy.
  • Go to CompUSA or your local computer store and try using it. If you live near one of the Apple stores, I'd recommend you go in there and ask questions. They are very friendly and knowledgable. I too was considering an iBook. I'm interested in doing my C++/java/web development on it. However, after reading some of the comments on this board, I'm second guessing. There is no point in spending that much on hardware and on a "great" os that has these limitations, in my opinion. However, I'd love to be proven wrong. I really want an iBook.
    • The local CompUSA here has several modern Macs running Mac OS X. I pulled up the console (terminal.app) and poked around a bit. It's very much like the NeXT unix machines I've used in the past. Even pico was installed by default, heh.

      However...

      CompUSA didn't have the developer tools (gcc, gdb, libs, the awesome GUI debugger and IDE, etc) installed. Have the manager fetch the CD or bring in your own:

      http://developer.apple.com/tools/macosxtools.html [apple.com]

    • I'm a webmaster that uses OS X for my desktop, and I love it. For Java/Web development, OS X is fantastic. It has java, perl, and all of your unix tools built in by default. Apache comes standard as well, but you'll probably want to compile your own flavor to match your production environment. If you're doing design work, you get the benefit of the Macintosh graphics apps like Photoshop and Illustrator.


      I can't really speak for C++, since I use Apple's Cocoa dev environment which is built for Java or Objective C. However gcc comes with the free developer's tools, so I imagine you can do all your C++ stuff with the standard unix tools. For my purposes, I've found OS X to easily match Linux for dev work once you get used to the idiosyncracies.

  • It helps to think of it as NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP (Score:3, Informative)

    by green pizza ( 159161 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @07:21PM (#2879101) Homepage
    Mac OS X is just as unix-ish as the NeXT OSes it's based on -- NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP. True, in many ways it doesn't look like a traditional unix, especially regarding filesystem layout and the use of NetInfo. Like NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP, it has its quarks, but for the most part, things work. It's Unix, but it's a funky Unix. And if you don't want to pay for it, you can run the bare guts, the opensource non-GUI version, Darwin. (even on x86)

    Here are three better URLs:
    http://developer.apple.com/unix/index.html [apple.com]

    http://developer.apple.com/darwin/ [apple.com]

    http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin/ [apple.com]
  • Linux is great for what it is. Linux is a swiss army knife. It is most things to most people. There's nothing it wont do if you're willing to put forth the effort to use what's there. In itself that's a wonderful design philosophy. I've been using Linux for a long time and it amazes me what it can do when people put their minds to it. Gearheads love this sort of OS, and love to demonstrate it's ability to perform any function no matter how arcane or bizarre the procedure to get there is. The people who build Linux are pragmatists. Soured by years of lofty goals, but failed implementations, they work to make a system that solves all the problems, even if they have to compromise usability, simplicity, or advanced design. Efficiency is stressed at the system level. I've never encountered a general purpose computing task that could not be solved by Linux.

    MacOS X on the other hand is more like a perfectly ergonomic, intuitivley simple yet surprisingly flexible single bladed knife. It doesn't have a corkscrew or scissors, But the handle grip doubles as a file and it is perfectly balanced along every axis. Ninjas use it for throwing, Butchers use it for cutting meat. Carpenters use it to score material and Master chefs use it to prepare dishes, but you wont be able to open a wine bottle, it wont loosen most phillips screws and you'll just make a mess if you try to open a can of peas or bottle of beer with it. It also wont fit in your pocket. However, if there was ever a knife that was a perfect balance of asthetics, utility, and well executed engineering, this is it. Again, a wonderful design philosophy.
  • that is a response to your question of whether their laptops can be plugged into non-mac monitors. I was pricing one out recently, and one of the options was a ~$20 VGA adapter. I guess that answers one of your many questions.

    • yes, yes. (Score:2, Informative)

      by nwanua ( 70972 )
      I just put my PB to sleep, plugged in a monitor into the VGA port, woke it up and boom: I was typing this message in a window displayed on that monitor.

      So... yes. Absolutely (at least on a PB Ti)
    • The good news: the iBook comes with the VGA adapter.

      The bad news: the iBook only supports video mirroring (the same image on both the LCD and monitor), and you can't use ONLY the external monitor; the iBook must be open (and thus the LCD on) in order to use an external monitor.

  • "Mac Monitors" (Score:4, Informative)

    by green pizza ( 159161 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @07:38PM (#2879227) Homepage
    Apple's desktops have offered a generic, common, plain SVGA HD-15 connector since the first blue&white G3's several years ago. Almost every single PC monitor will work on a blue&white G3 or silver/graphite G4 without any sort of adapter.

    However, older macs used a DB-15 (two rows of pins rather than three rows) connector for the monitor. These require a $10 - $30 adapter to offer the proper connector and pin routing if a PC monitor is to be used.

    All current Apple monitors use ADC, the Apple Display Connector... a single cable that carries power, signal, and usb to the montior. ADC is based on some obscure standard that nobody else adopted. Macs with ADC have a second alternate connector for SVGA HD15, but only one connector can be used at a time.

    The PowerBook G4 has a SVGA HD15 monitor connector.

    The iBook has a funky monitor connector, but a SVGA HD15 adapter is included.

    Current desktop Macs have both SVGA HD15 and ADC connectors on their gfx cards. An ADC -> DVI adapter is included for use with a DVI flat panel. (Should you choose not to buy an Apple flat panel). THough, I have been told by more than one person that they had to buy the ADC -> DVI adapter as it's not included with all new G4s. Go figure.

    Hope this helps.

    • Re:"Mac Monitors" (ADC) (Score:4, Informative)

      by helixblue ( 231601 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @10:58PM (#2880113) Homepage
      As far as the ADC based on some obscure standard. All ADC is DVI+USB+power. You buy a splitter if you need one.

      I myself have a 22" Apple Cinema Display DVI model.. so I bought a combiner that takes the DVI+USB+Power and makes it into ADC.

      I'll admit, ADC isn't the norm (though you can buy PC video cards with ADC connectors).. but it's not a half bad idea to take the 3 connections from the monitor and combine it.

      It's just nothing wildly proprietary.
    • Some model Macs let you use both the HD15 and ADC connector at once.

      If you browse the Apple store web site [apple.com], and configure a G4 tower system, you will see three video options. One is a single-head GeForce2-MX board, one is a dual-head GeForce2-MX board (aka "TwinView"), and one is a single-head GeForce3 board.

      The "TwinView" board will let you run two (non-mirrored) monitors off of one card - one on the HD15 and one on the ADC.

      If you choose one of the other two video cards, then only one connector may be used at a time.

    • Better monitors will come with the HD-15/DB-15 adapter so you can jam them on older Macs. My Samsung SyncMaster 900p I got in 99' came with such an adapter though I didn't need it to hook up to my PowerBook. As for the ADC it is just a normal DVI connection with extra pins for USB and power. Not only can you get adapters to run DVI displays from ADC equipped towers but you can also get DVI versions of both Studio and Cinema display flat panels from Apple. They cost the same IIRC but require a special order. AFAIK the GeForce cards have two ports (one VGA and one ADC) but only the Twin View GF2MX uses both at once.

  • Yes, it's a unix (Score:5, Informative)

    by zhobson ( 22730 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @07:44PM (#2879276) Homepage
    I am a long-time unix user (first Linux, then FreeBSD) who recently decided to buy my first Mac, a low-end iBook. I'm running Mac OS X on it exclusively (I despise the old Mac OS).

    It runs nearly all of my favorite open source unix apps, including the X applications. I am personally using mutt, gvim (that's vim with the GTK frontend), nethack and a few others. I like the new operating system very much, and even though bits of it don't look like unix, that's usually because they're NeXTish instead.

    It's also probably reelevant to mention that the GNUstep libraries are mostly source-compatible with Apple's Cocoa API, so you can compile GNUstep apps and they'll work just like "native" OS X apps. Plus the development tools are all completely free (unlike the other major commercial desktop OS).

  • I haven't actually worked with the toolbox since Sys7, and I haven't seen OSX at all, but, perhaps see how much of the Macintosh functionality has been made available (quicktime.h, quickdraw.h, etc) to compilable apps. If you find that some of the toolbox actually has been made available, then it's more than BSD-style unix, otherwise, yes, it's something equal or "less".

  • Very happy Mac OS X user (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21, 2002 @07:55PM (#2879344)
    I'm very happy with Mac OS X for two reasons:

    1) I previously worked for a large Linux and Solaris based ISP. I'm still able to work with all of my favorite command line utilities and perl scripts.

    2) It's boss friendly, It's geek friendly. -- I can compile and run the stuff I want. My boss can run Microsoft Office v.X. It's a "commercial, supported OS", whatever the hell that means (important to some people I guess). And the full, complete developer environment is free....
    http://developer.apple.com/tools/macosxtools.htm l
  • Uhm, I mean seriously. Did you really need an Ask Slashdot to figure this out? Apple has a website. I'll leave finding it as an exercise to the reader. Look up about MacOS X, you'll find its core is Darwin. Darwin is BSD based. What more do you want? Go to [insert chain computer store here] and play with a machine. Stop asking stupid questions you're too lazy to figure out on your own.

    • Re:These questions are getting old... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Daniel Dvorkin ( 106857 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2002 @06:20PM (#2884545) Homepage Journal
      Give people the benefit of the doubt, okay? I've never written an Ask Slashdot without thoroughly checking out all the other resources I can find, and there's no reason to believe that other posters don't do the same. The whole idea of Ask Slashdot is for users to benefit from the knowledge of the community -- which is supposed to be one of Unix's strengths. The "RTFM" attitude is helpful to nobody. Remember, what goes around, comes around.
      • I understand your point. However, that doesn't exemplify the majority of Ask Slashdot posters. There are many resources you can exhaust before coming to Ask Slashdot. Only then should you write in. The RTFM attitude is helpful to everybody. It teaches you to read a little better and it keeps people with knowledge from having to waste their time answering petty questions that are already documented.
      • There is _every_ reason to believe that other posters don't do the same, because it happens A L L T H E T I M E. It is exactly these users that the 'RTFM' attitude is for.

  • Yes, there are bonuses. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mkoz ( 323688 )
    If you are willing to run Xwindows in addition to MacOS X you can get almost anything working... as other have suggested look into the fink project.

    Pluses to Apple Hardware:
    Fairly nice power management, I have not done the comparison, but I get decent (2.5 hours on a battery) off an old walstreet powerbook in OS X.
    Nice wireless, Airport is a just another standard wireless card, but it works well out of the box.
    I have had no problems attaching PBs to a number of external monitor and projectors.
    In general they make nice hardware.
    • dual monitor is built in on the powerbooks, i would guess also on the iBook, but i'm speculating there.

      and this is a COOL thing. you can run the monitor as a mirror to your lcd, or have it as a separate screen that can be positioned anywhere around the powerbook's screen. great for presentations - you can move the presentation notes to the 'book's screen and have the presentation come out the svga port.

  • Whether OS X seems like Unix or not depends on you (Score:5, Informative)

    by alangmead ( 109702 ) on Monday January 21, 2002 @09:49PM (#2879874)
    Whether you call it Unix at all depends on your definition. Depending
    on whether you look at OSX from a kernel perspective, as a development
    platform, a unix user, or a unix administrator, it can vary between
    being a "true unix" to something very foreign.

    It most looks like unix if look at a system call interface (aka
    section 2 of the man pages. Things like open, read, write, close,
    fork, and exec). The user commands (section 1 of the man pages. Things
    like ls,cp, and rm) exist but all of /bin, /sbin, and /usr are
    entirely hidden from the GUI. For actual user commands, they are in
    some ways rather spartan (traditional BSD versions, not all-singing,
    all-dancing GNU versions.) but there are some rather interesting
    additions (emacs, tcsh, pico, gcc, autoconf, and gnu tar.)

    Standard Unix system libraries (section 3 of the man pages
    fopen,fread,printf,system,and popen) exist as a "non-preferred"
    interface. The command line utilities are built against them, but
    building an arbitrary tarball developed under linux might show some
    compatiblity quirks. (those same quirks might exist trying to port to
    FreeBSD) Most of the file and process oriented tasks can be done in
    the OS X specific libraries with an API entirely unlike the POSIX ones
    in libc. (This isn't anything new really, these OS X libraries are the
    updated versions of what came with the first NextStations in 1987.)
    Shared libraries are somewhat different than what probably currently
    exists in FreeBSD. I bet it started because NeXT implemented shared
    libraries before the became standard in BSD, but they need to continue
    their own system because it hooks into the object oriented IPC
    framework that is much of what the makes the system interesting.

    From a system administrators standpoint (I guess to keep my analogies,
    section 4 (device files) and section 5 (configuration files)) things
    are radically different. /etc/passwd is essentially a stub. There is
    no /etc/inittab. There are few useful things in /usr/lib, /usr/share,
    /var, or /etc, but /Library and /System/Library are full of goodies
    (like /System/Library/Perl and /System/Library/OpenSSL). There is no
    /home, instead there is /Users (which through some automount magic
    merges /Network/Users with the local /Users) Again, this system is
    inherited from NeXT.

    As a user, its a modern mouse and windows type of system. Its slightly
    more interapplication oriented, less monolithic application oriented.

    Like my friends who used NeXT systems in the past, there seem to be
    two ways to deal with the system peculiarities. The first is to assume
    that the system is a very stripped down Unix system, ignore whats in
    /Library and /System/Library and build your own
    /usr/local/{bin,lib,share}. The other way is to buy into its
    weirdness.
  • Does anyone remember this same question being asked before?

  • The answer is "yes" (Score:2, Informative)

    by seth ( 984 )
    To answer the question asked, yes.

    I'm currently using OSX running on a G4 Cube at home and a G4 Black and White in my office for most of my writing and research programming (my laptop still run linux and sees a good deal of use).

    I do all of writing in LaTeX (using teTeX) and occasionally use mutt. OSX comes with GNU emacs installed, but I've started to use bbedit as my text editor of choice. X11 will run rootless in OSX, so you can use the X-enabled GNU emacs and xemacs if you want (and I have). All my documents end up in CVS, and transitioning them from one machine to another requires no changes what-so-ever.

    I haven't touched mutt or fetchmail, my home mail server is still a linux box, which I ssh into, and the same in my office. I assume they work, however. I'm pretty sure there are fink packages available.

    OSX isn't Linux, it is based on NeXT, and, therefore, does have a number of quirks. Besides one issue with the GUI [1], I have not found any issues that make me want to switch back to a Linux box as a primary machine. Yes, updates are not weekly, and the debacle of OSX 10.1 being released without Developer Tools was annoying (though we were clearly warned before hand). However, none of these things are insurmountable.

    ProjectBuilder is ... interesting, and takes getting used to, but it powerful once you do spend some time in it.

    -Seth
    [1] I miss virtual workspaces that I can ctrl->right-arrow to terribly. The only current contender (a docklet called Spaces) doesn't have keyboard bindings and doesn't quite work 100%.
  • "Also regarding the investment in a new platform and coming from the x86 world, I'm a bit interested about the PowerPC performance in comparison to what I could get with a x86 notebook. I've read some articles and pages that suggest that PowerPCs may not be fast (or, in fact, may be quite slower than their x86 counterparts):

    John Carmacks Opinion [slashdot.org]

    Considering Carmack made this statement when x86 had just broken the gigahertz barrier and The G4 was actually faster than it is now due to the 512k cache, and that Apple has crippled both the Titanium and new iMac G4s with 100mhz front side busses, PPC has got to be eons behind x86 in performance by now...

    usefull links:

    Ars Technica G4 -vs- K7 Analysis [arstechnica.com]

    Ars Technica G4 -vs- P4 Analysis [arstechnica.com]
  • its not clear what you want to do with your computer. theres lots of things that macosX does well. theres things it doesnt.

    one thing it does, is it tries very hard to keep the mac concept of 'ease of use' - easy to just plug in a device and have it work. but this ease is defined by the types of devices. Steve Jobs wants the Mac to be a Digital Hub. that means, cameras, camcorders, mp3 players, cd burners, dvd burners - these all work well. there are some that dont, but a majority of them do. Macs have always been good at external storage - firewire drives plug in, and work. on osX, nfs, samba, appletalk file servers all are accessable.

    what exactly is a good performance number? well, if you do photoshop, you want some plugin to run fast. well, thats gonna run damn nicely on a g4. and you will pay for it, you'll pay cuz you also get a really nicely packaged piece of machinary around it. but that machinery, and its osX will also do oodles of nice things for you. you'll be able to easily suck photos from your digital camera into iPhoto, and have iPhoto zap together a nice thumbnail web gallery.

    you'll be able to create movies with iMovie and burn em to dvd with iDVD and your dvd superdrive.

    you'll be able to rip cds, shove the mp3s into your mp3 player (iPod or other) with iTunes. or, you can burn an audio cd with it too.

    thats the nice thing - it all works. sure, linux is coming along nicely, and maybe on kernel 2.6 firewire drives will work w/o kernel panics. thing is, osX does it all now.

    and for all its evils, the mac division at Microsoft does put out software that kicks ass over the Windows lines. IE works well. ('cept for a few javascript incompatibilities it works damn well in this windows IE based net of ours) Office works great.

    course, if you want to eschew microsoft, you can buy Appleworks for less than 1/4 the price of Office v.X, the only thing you dont get is PowerPoint.

    yeah, theres tonnes of issues - one of them is that the BSD its based on is old. certain packet filtering things dont work. but theres stuff that does work well. and yeah theres lots of obvious showy things like the bouncing icons and the magnifying icons that most /. readers turn off asap. but it IS a really really usable unix based system. and you dont have to go searching all over hell and gone to find the tools to do your everyday things. sure, you have to search around to build some of the unix things, and fink is a godsend for that. (everyone who knows or meets Christoph Pfisterer should buy him a beer or 10 for creating fink.)

    the reality is, if you want a really nice non microsoft os, and you want it to have nice easy tools for the consumer side of your life, but still have the stability and programability of a unix, its a good choice. sure, its different from linux, its different from solaris, but you dont really notice that after a while. you just get used to it being its own set of things.
    • course, if you want to eschew microsoft, you can buy Appleworks for less than 1/4 the price of Office v.X, the only thing you dont get is PowerPoint.

      Actually, AppleWorks 6 comes with a presentation module, although I haven't had a chance to try it out yet so I can't tell you how much it rocks or blows.

      Also, AppleWorks costs $0.00 with an iBook.

  • My experiences in MacOS as a Unix desktop (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Panix ( 2408 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2002 @02:01AM (#2880646) Homepage
    I am a long time Linux and UNIX user. I began running Linux exclusively fairly early in its life cycle, and thus I require a nice UNIX environment for my day to day life.

    About 3 weeks ago, I purchased an Apple Titanium PowerBook G4 with the intent of installing Linux on it. Since then, my experiences with OS X have made me reconsider.

    I started out quite skeptical, but was pleasantly surprised to find many of my favorite Linux/UNIX applications available. Step 1 was to install Fink. Fink is a source and binary distribution of UNIX applications and utilities for OS X. I installed it quickly, and was able to use the debian-like commands (apt-get install!) to get Python, rootless XFree86, and bash installed. Fink can be found at http://fink.sourceforge.net.

    Since then, I have grown used to the excellent environment that they have built, Its very refreshing to see such a usable and powerful desktop environment based around a standard UNIX kernel!

    Now, there are some caveats. Some of the standard locations for things don't make sense. For example, the /etc/hosts file exists, but does not appear to be used. Instead, you must use Apple's NetInfo manager. Additionally, the base compiler's supplied with Apple's developer tools have some differences that make porting a little bit interesting. Overall though, its a great UNIX environment.

    I am extremely happy with the UNIX side of Mac OS X, but I am equally impressed with the amazing usability and cool technology of Aqua and Quartz. Very cool stuff.

    If you have any questions about my experience, feel free to post them here and I will do my best to respond.
    • Thank you very much for being available for other questions.

      Could you please e-mail me at dt_rules@hotmail.com? I don't want to use my main e-mail address here because I'm getting increasing amounts of spam. I have tried to find your e-mail address, but I couldn't. This is why I'm asking you this.

      Thank you very much for your comments.

  • i just recently dumped the whole x86 archetechture and went with a powerbook g4 for college next year (parents pay half as a graduation present). the powerbook supports my 17" NEC multisync monitor flawlessly. what's better is that it treats it as a dual monitor display, rather than replicating the primary display, and at resolutions up to 1600x1200 on the secondary monitor (1152x768 for the main lcd)....very nice indeed. my adivce is to skip the ibook and get a powerbook, it's a fully fledged desktop when you hook up a second monitor, and has pretty much everything your desktop has built in, cd-rw/dvd, 10/100/1000 base t eithernet, usb and firewire, plus Svideo out. the only thing you might consider is a usb video capture and usb mouse. you might say it lacks expandability, but you need to look and see that this laptop has everything required for day to day operation for the next 2 years already built in. the only thing you might ask for is counterstrike and a dvd-r.
  • My processor rule of thumb goes like this:

    AMD's "1800+" type labels, while cheesy, are essentially accurate in comparing in to the latest P4 generation. I normally give G4 hardware about a 2x advantage clock-for-clock to a P4 - so an 800 Mhz G4 ~ AMD 1600+ ~ P4 1.6 Ghz. I don't have a handle on Transmeta. PIIIs and G3s seem to not be significantly clock-for-clock worse than the newer generations, but the G4 and P4 achieved much higher clocks.

    Is this perfectly accurate? No. Could you spend hours listing things that affect speed? Yes. Are various bus and interface speeds probably more important than the CPU? Yes, especially if one of them is slow, because the bottleneck has the most prominent effect.

    The upshot is that the fastest x86 chips are faster these days, and cheaper. OTOH, raw CPU is probably not your bottleneck.

    Laptop wise, you should be aware the PPC chips are fairly power friendly, and x86 chips are hogs. iBooks have ludicrious battery life, and that's good. Also, "SpeedStep" is tricky: SpeedStep does NOT reduce the power consumption of the CPU by idling it when it's not being maxed - it reduces the power consumption AND the clock rate WHENEVER the laptop is unplugged. There might be a way to supress this, but it would make your battery work even less time than they start with.

    I'd certainly get a Powerbook G4 before I'd get an iBook, if I could afford it. The flexibility is awesome. But I'd be able to afford an iBook sooner...
  • It has a great developer environment too. ProjectBuilder is okay as a tool to build Objective C and Java apps with. All the usual UNIX development tools are available or pre-installed with it, and Java is integrated really well. You can access the Cocoa graphics layer from within Java and so create native looking objects, and as Java is well integrated, you don't really lose any performance with it.

    Java apps are like native code.
  • At least for micro benchmarks, the unix performance really, really sucks. See
    http://lists.apple.com/archives/darwin-kernel/2001 /Dec/2.html
    Toward the bottom there's lmbench output indicating that Darwin is roughly an order of magnitude slower than Linux or NetBSD on the same hardware for things like syscalls, context switch, file creation, etc.

    There is a packet filter (as well as a bpf):
    ~>uname -a
    Darwin g4 1.4 Darwin Kernel Version 1.4: Sun Sep 9 15:39:59 PDT 2001; root:xnu/xnu-201.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
    ~>sudo kmodstat | grep Firewall
    59 0 0x15053000 0x4000 0x3000 com.apple.nke.IPFirewall (1.1)
    ~>sudo ipfw list
    65535 allow ip from any to any

    ~>sudo tcpdump -i en0
    tcpdump: listening on en0
    13:15:13.707607 g4.22 > thunder.1357: P 2129343678:2129343722(44) ack 994474742 win 33304 (DF) [tos 0x10]
  • When I installed Mac OS X, I was ecstatic to find that emacs was already installed (possibly because I installed the developer tools?). I also ported my Eiffel compiler and all of my command line apps to it in less than an hour. Ftp worked just by enabling (using the GUI). I've in fact used the command line far more than the GUI. I'm still trying to get comfortable with the GUI.
  • We are running OSX 10.1 (not OSX server) on our dual processor G-4 web server for a State government office. Perl runs great as cgi. Muti-user and multi-tasking is a major improvement over previous Apple server in OS 9. Can use terminal to do Unix-like things. Pico is included, but TextEdit works just as well. Had to change one line in httpd for Apache server to get cgi to work, but have had to make no other changes to the web server, just drop files into Documents folder and they are on the web. Very secure, no root or FTP running, although they can be enabled. Also running FileMaker Database server under Classic on the same machine. Very stable. Get one.
  • NetInfo has a large number of configuration options. One of them is the ability to read and use flat files in /etc.

    If you take a normal OS X system and dump the NetInfo info into /etc (man niutil) then you can setup NetInfo to look in /etc for it's datafiles (not sure where though).
  • I posted this from Lynx, on xterm, in Enlightenment, on OS X. Is that Unix-like enough for you?

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