Migrating from Debian to OS X

[kveroneau]

Hello everybody!

I used to have an iMac and a Powerbook back in the days of OS 9 and when OS X was just released. A fun fact, is OS X started my journey into UNIX, OpenBSD, and then Linux. Now, I am making the journey back to the Mac world, and have a few questions.

Firstly, I obtained a slightly used MacBook 1,4. I upgraded it to Mac OS X 10.6.6. Installed VirtualBox to make it easy to migrate my old Debian box into a Virtual Machine(which works perfectly).

I attempted to use MacPorts to access some of my existing Debian software, but was saddened to see that there are no binary ports. Compiling can take a very long time.

Here are my questions:

Has dm-crypt been ported to Darwin/OSX, as either native or via MacFUSE? I have an external HDD, 750GB full of backups. This drive was formatted using cryptsetup and ext3. I have been searching, and could not yet find a solution.

Is it possible to compile x2vnc or x2x on Mac OS X? I understand that Mac OS X ships with X11.app, but am unable to find a Mac port of these programs. How easy would it be to compile these applications on Mac OS X?

Is there a command line version of mplayer and mencoder for the Mac OS X Terminal? I tend to use both to transcode and extract information from movie files. I also use ffmpeg in many shell scripts to transcode video files, has this been natively ported to the Mac OS X Terminal? How does one play .FLV files directly under Mac OS X? Both QuickTime and Mplayer GUI refuse to play them? Under Debian, I am able to use the mplayer command-line to play these video files with no additional effort.

I guess most of these questions are related to my dependence on the Linux command-line. I have many existing shell scripts which I would just like to use on my shiny new MacBook without needing to use VirtualBox/Dualboot or use another machine. I was hoping that the UNIX subsystem in Mac OS X had evolved since I previous used it. However, finding a decent package manager for binary packages or any command-line tools I am used to is becoming troublesome. Is there a Darwin package manager hidden deep inside OS X which I am missing somewhere? Couldn't Darwin use the package manager from another popular BSD such as FreeBSD and use a different repo? I was happy to see Python installed by default, this definitely is a big help.

Thanks to anyone who can answer even one of these questions.

If you would like to read about my migration so far, visit my personal homepage: www.chronoboy.com

 

[kveroneau]

Okay, so I answered some of my own questions. A perfect port of mplayer is available via MacPorts, which supports the same formats I am used to on Debian. I am quiet sure I can also copy over my w32codecs to my MacBook as well.

Still couldn't locate a port of x2vnc, or dm-crypt. I'll try compiling x2vnc and see if it compiled under OS X, then I'll add a Portfile myself to the MacPorts for it.

I am starting to assume that I may have posted this in the wrong forum, as I have not received a single reply since I created this post...

 

[bmcgonag]

Okay, so I answered some of my own questions. A perfect port of mplayer is available via MacPorts, which supports the same formats I am used to on Debian. I am quiet sure I can also copy over my w32codecs to my MacBook as well.

Still couldn't locate a port of x2vnc, or dm-crypt. I'll try compiling x2vnc and see if it compiled under OS X, then I'll add a Portfile myself to the MacPorts for it.

I am starting to assume that I may have posted this in the wrong forum, as I have not received a single reply since I created this post...

Why are you using ports of some of these apps? There are mac versions out there for VLC, Mplayer, etc. I'm just a bit lost on your end goal. I'd love to help if I can though.

 

[smirk]

Yeah, probably not too many people on the "Mac Basics" forum are using Mac Ports and command line video players.

One thing, if you haven't already -- head over to http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki and grab the latest version of the X11 app from them. You can read about it on their site, but basically it is a more advanced version of X11 with more recent bugfixes than Apple's version.

I think the UNIX subsystem has improved a lot since you last used it. I'm far from an expert with such things, but I was able to compile glib and gtk right out of the box.

 

[kveroneau]

Why are you using ports of some of these apps? There are mac versions out there for VLC, Mplayer, etc. I'm just a bit lost on your end goal. I'd love to help if I can though.

The GUI version of Mplayer OS X 2 appears to be missing support for ffmpeg and w32codecs libraries, thus making it support less file formats. Haven't tried VLC for quite awhile, although I recall I wasn't too fond of it's UI.

With mplayer on Debian, I was using it to extract the audio from a music video downloaded from YouTube for example. Mplayer has an extensive amount of command-line options to extend it from a basic video player to more. I then used LAME to encode the WAV file extracted from the video to an MP3. I have a bash shell script which automates this process, it even takes the FLV file from the Firefox Cache to make the process even easier to use.

One thing, if you haven't already -- head over to http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki and grab the latest version of the X11 app from them. You can read about it on their site, but basically it is a more advanced version of X11 with more recent bugfixes than Apple's version.

I'll definitely have too look into this, thanks. I do find the version of X11.app with 10.6.6 to work very well. It even supports 2D acceleration over a TCP connection. With my old laptop image inside VirtualBox, I was able to export my DISPLAY to X11.app to display Firefox(I know...), and it was able to play a YouTube flash video with no issues whatsoever. That is very impressive. It's much quicker than XMingW32 for Windows, which lacks any acceleration. Does 3D acceleration work via X11.app or Xquartz?

 

[satcomer]

Here is just some of my favorite (free) Applications:

1. Perian for a QuickTime codec that plays most all video files.

2. HandBrake. DVD ripper.

3. MakeMKV Blu-Ray ripper.

4. TinkerTool Tweak OS X the easy way.

5. Secrets. Really tweak OS X.

6. Alarm Clock The Name tells all about this simple free alarm clock.

7. KisMac. Break WEP in 4 second as proved in this video.

8. iStumbler99. When you want to look at what WiFi channels are being used around you at the time.

9. Plex. Media App for the Mac so good LG is licensing it for their new TVs.

 

[kveroneau]

Here is just some of my favorite (free) Applications.

Thank you very much for this list, it definitely helps. Especially QuickTime being able to play more codecs, it will make iDVD more useful imho. I found it very stupid that iDVD could not use an uncompressed mpeg2 file, the complete opposite of most Linux DVD authoring software, which only support mpeg2.

 

[bmcgonag]

If you do try VLC again (able to play most any file format on Mac), but don' tlike it still, a lot of folks on the site also like Movist.

Not sure about ripping audio from YouTube videos...I don't look at youtube much, but definitely virtualbox would work out for using debian distros, or you could run it via boot-camp, though rebooting kind of sucks.

 

[kveroneau]

If you do try VLC again (able to play most any file format on Mac), but don' tlike it still, a lot of folks on the site also like Movist.

Not sure about ripping audio from YouTube videos...I don't look at youtube much, but definitely virtualbox would work out for using debian distros, or you could run it via boot-camp, though rebooting kind of sucks.

Thank you for the suggestion, so far Debian under VirtualBox is performing at almost the same speed as it was natively under my PC laptop. Mind you, my PC was only core running at 1.7Gz. This MacBook is a huge upgrade, even though it's a rather dated MacBook. Thanks to the VT-x support on the MacBook's Intel processor, the performance of any Guest OS is great!

Dualbooting does suck, I only did it on my PC for Netflix and the odd game. However, since Mac OS X supports Netflix, and even Plex supports it, I have little need to reboot. Even Mac supports more commercial games than Linux, just purchased Spore via Amazon and should arrive today via UPS. I do hope Blizzard has plans to support Mac for Diablo 3. They supported Mac for Diablo 1 and 2, so I'm hoping...

For those who enjoy games on their Mac and have used Steam and other similar services, you should check out OnLive. It supports many very popular PC games, and works similar to how Netflix works.