From GNU/Linux to Mac OS X (My experience)

[Compile 'em all]

Hello All,
I have recently published a post on my blog that I wanted to share with
Macrumors about my move from Debian GNU/Linux to Mac OS X.
Please feel free to leave comments either here or on the blog.
Thanx.

New PowerBook owner

 

[robbieduncan]

You can have fullscreen QuickTime without paying via AppleScript.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Your experience with Mac OS X seems profoundly mixed so far. I'm a little surprised that you disliked top-posting so much - I think that's at least partly because I've never used bottom-posting.

I agree with you about iTunes - it makes managing your iPod and your music collection simple. If you're like me, and have to tag songs yourself often, you should check out Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes - there are some useful scripts there for automating various iTunes tasks.

 

[Compile 'em all]

Your experience with Mac OS X seems profoundly mixed so far. I'm a little surprised that you disliked top-posting so much - I think that's at least partly because I've never used bottom-posting.

Bottom-posting is the defacto standard on most usenet groups and technical mailing lists. YMMV of course.

I agree with you about iTunes - it makes managing your iPod and your music collection simple. If you're like me, and have to tag songs yourself often, you should check out Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes - there are some useful scripts there for automating various iTunes tasks.

Thanks for the link, looks interesting.

 

[Westside guy]

You may already know about fink, which is a porting system that allows you to use a lot of the Linux/BSD tools you're familiar with. It's quite handy and makes it easy, especially coming from Debian.

If there are only a handful of programs you need, though, I think you're better off learning to build stuff yourself - fink's support infrastructure is pretty big. OS X has all the familiar auto-tools (autoconf, automake, etc.), and it's usually pretty straightforward to figure out how to get things to build if you've done that sort of stuff under Linux in the past.

For the few GNU-ish tools I need (slocate, nedit, ImageMagick, wget; maybe one or two others) I found that my space usage went from almost 800M to about 30M when I stopped using fink.

 

[mkrishnan]

Bottom-posting is the defacto standard on most usenet groups and technical mailing lists. YMMV of course.

Yeah, for some reason, this dichotomy has grown as the systems for e-mail and forums / newsgroups diverged. Because (I know what you said about mentioning Windows) on desktops of a variety of platforms, people use top-posting, and I'm pretty sure most web-based e-mail clients also top post. It used to annoy me, and I used to manually shift things around, and then after a while, I said meh, and started going with the flow. On the web, I bottom post. In e-mail, I top post.

However, unless you want something different than I think you want, I think you can actually get it from Mail.app. Go to the preferences, and then signatures. At the bottom, uncheck the box "Place signature above quoted text." When you reply to a message, you now get the quoted text first and the signature last, so that you can insert your comments in. Is that what you want?

PS...welcome to the fold, even if you're only partway in!

 

[Omen88]

For making LaTeX documents I recommend TeXshop. It's everything one can wish for.

 

[Compile 'em all]

Thanx for your replies, I really appreciate it. I have been following Mac
rumors for more than 2 months before buying the powerbook. So I knew
pretty much what apps I needed to install before actually starting to use OS
X. I have installed Fink and X11 as soon as I opened the new powerbook
(thats was on 19/05/2005 ) as well as other necessary apps (Texshop...etc).