From: James Propp <jpropp@cs.uml.edu>

Chris Hillman writes:

...

In my response, I will assume little prior knowledge or experience with (in particular) installing open source software

I appreciate this assumption (or lack of assumption), since this very issue has often been a bottleneck for me. ("Well, first install Xtools on your laptop, and then...") ... on a Mac running OS X?

If you are maybe thinking of "XCode" instead of "Xtools," XCode is something you almost have to have on your Mac if you're going to use open source stuff. If you have a /Developer directory, you do have XCode. If not, XCode is a disk that comes in the OS X box. (Yes I know Xtools too, this just reminded me.)

I've been quite happy with my Mac OS X running shell-script windows that look like any old UNIX system.

Which it is. The question is why it keeps seeming...in a different class, heh.

(I can think of one exception to the previous statement: I was pretty annoyed when I found out that OS X puts all the files and directories in one's Desktop into RAM at startup. Aside from the fact that it's undocumented, it's just not the sort of thing a UNIX system would do.)

I am not familiar with the phenomenon to which you refer... unless someone configured your computer with some serious evil magic I don't understand.

Sounds like rsynch (or is it rsync?) is also something I would find useful. How do I get it?

Erm, $ which rsync /usr/bin/rsync $ Yes, I'm pretty sure it comes with OS X. I know the OS X rsync handles the weirdnesses of Mac files.

I should also say that the PDF viewer that came with my Mac is not in all respects perfect. I'll probably want to spring for something better.

As far as I know, Adobe reader (free), (although it's the most annoying about blasting you with ads for itself and extra icons on the display) is the best PDF viewer (in particular the best at displaying papers with bitmapped fonts). This is a big mystery to me. According to legend, Knuth produced TeX and later MetaFont (caps?) because he was disappointed with the state of math typesetting and wanted to see beautifully typeset math. DVI, the output format of TeX, supports outline fonts. So why is it that math papers, produced through LATEX, always have the WORST fonts!? I have seen comments that this is because some people haven't updated to the 1998 version of LATEX or something, but it KEEPS HAPPENING. What is the exact deal?

...

Of course, Mac OS has suffered some equally serious security problems

The seriousness of security problems is a subjective thing. I mean, maybe Debian had a lapse and Mac OS has needed to patch potential vulnerabilities and these are "serious," but then there's Windows serious.

Would the Mac OS security issue affect a user like me, who has a laptop with no fixed IP address?

If you say "yes" to install the security updates it reminds you about, then probably not. --Steve