So, I'm trying to do some stuff on my aging

Mac

  to make my photo uploads easier.  I need to install imagemagick.  So I figure, no biggie:
WTF? imagemagick is dependent on GNOME?

So, I think, OK, "fink install imagemagick-nox".  Nada.  "The following 96 additional packages will be installed".  Jezu on a freakin' pogostick.

Next up, go to the G to find out the dillie:

So I toss in the towel. Fuggeddaboudit.  I'd be here, literally for days, waiting for this crap to install on my aging PPC OS X box. But for giggles I check by X

ubuntu

  box (aka

Debian

  for imagemagick dependencies just to see how much crack the Fink maintainer is smoking:

Obviously huge rocks of crack. Fishing amateurs. And Darwin ports is less well maintained than Fink, if that's even imaginable.

=RT=

Why don't you just go configure/make/make install and be done with it?

Get rid of the shitty

OSX

  and install

ubuntu

 
Just got a

mac

 book and it rocks with

ubuntu

 

LOL yeah there've you've got the worst of all worlds... custom hardware with GNOME or KDE. Deligthful. I don't know what version of

OS-X

  you've been using Nop, but it's great. And of course the GUI is exceptional

vanilla gnome is very plain and kde is more fisher price than xp.
but with compiz + emerald themes it blows

osx

  away. you can even have those bouncy launcher/docking icons like on

osx

  with awn.

I do have a

Linux

  box, X

ubuntu

 , aka

Debian

  (just a matter of which repo's you use).  It's my test server, not my desktop.  Truth be told I'd rather have a

Solaris

  box for that, but you gotta work with what you got.

As for make/install by hand on OS X, too much work, Perk.  Why bother when I can type 'sudo apt-get install imagemagick'?  Which I did on the test server.  I'll just automate the tasks via a shell script or something to go back and forth between my desktop and the

Linux

  box.

My point was more along the lines of: what the hell are they thinking, making a CLI utility dependent on a (bloated) windowing system?  Pure and unadulterated crack.

And on the topic of "get rid of that

Mac

  OS X crap":    OS X just works.  I don't have to waste time figuring out why my audio card (on the supported list) doesn't work (

Ubuntu

 ); why my LCD works fine from a LiveCD but doesn't work when the OS is installed on the HD (

Ubuntu

 , Gentoo); why my boot partition got corrupted (every

Linux

  & BSD distro on a certain piece of Sun hardware); or why I get kernel panics when I try to install a particular BSD distro on that same piece of Sun hardware).  I could go on.

Many years of system administration experience have taught me that I do not want my desktop computer--the one I have to face everyday for 8+ hours at a time--to be the one that has to be tinkered with endlessly just to work consistently.  If I wanted that, I'd have never left Windows! (had to get that dig in there)

Try running latest/greatest version of Gnome/KDE in a lightweight config on 5yr old x86 hardware (including graphics).  You'll be unpleasantly surprised.  This is reason #2 for OS X.  My desktop runs better with OS X 10.4 than it did with it's original OS.

I'm no fanboi.  I got burned bad by OS X patches in the past (10.2.6--battery killa), so there are very specific things I do before all updates.  The hardware line is missing a decent mid-range, but at the low-end, the price point is pretty well on target.  But given the dumb crap I've seen in the IT world desktop or otherwise,

Apple

  is better than 80/20, which is saying *a lot*.

=RT=

but that's the fun part
honestly i never used

osx

  so anything i say about is completely uneducated.

Oh I completely get it. The notion of dependencies (albeit, implemented in a completely different way) in Windows is part of what makes that OS suck pond water. I don't mind *certain* dependencies if I know what I'm getting into, but for the most part, nodeps==better.



It's always interesting to me how people claim that the control

Apple

  exerts on their hardware and software is somehow

mac

 hiavellian or controlfreakish - it's for the very reason you just identified. If I want a something to tinker with, tweak, try stuff out etc OK - I'll get an old board and play about. Install *nix and off I go. But you are *dead on* the most important point: the

mac

 hine that I sit in front of from around 6:30a to around midnight 7 days a week (oh Fish is that really how my life looks? ) I want to work without question, every minute - and the GUI must facilitate easier use not be an interesting puzzle. I love to put

Mac

 s into my clients offices because (for the most part) they are WAY too busy to dick around and tinker - they just want stuff to work. And it does, with aplomb.



It's OpenBSD under the hood - it's rock solid. The Darwin kernel is simply an extension of that work, and of course the GUI sits on top like GNOME or KDE.

The

mac

 book I buy is an Model No. A1226
I am not sure to be honest which version of

OSX

  (sales guy said it what called some cat name) runs on it.

In an nutshell went to manila to buy a new laptop. After only 6 months I broke my ASUS. In fairness the ASUS was a nice little

mac

 hine, but for people like me it has not durability.
After only 6 months the hinge broke, and the lid is about to fall off.

Basically what I wanted was something similar to the X1000 that compaq used to make. My X1000 after 3 years still runs, for the time huge screen etc, probably one of the best laptops compaq made (last one they made before HP merger). Metal case very nicely made. (Probably why they stopped making them ).

Anyway I go to look at all the shops, lots of high powered laptops, but they all look kinda tinny like, not a single one of them has a metal case, and they look like I will break them in like 4 months. Also it a pain in the ass, everytime I get a new puter, it takes me like 3 days to install all my custom software etc.

So for shits and giggles I went into the

apple

  shop. And I asked him to show me the

mac

 book there.
From the keyboard backlight, to the excellent large clear LCD.
Simple little things like the ma

gnet

  on the power cord, so when i trip over it i will not yank my laptop on the ground, or destroy another power adaptor.
Nice metal case. Etc.
And for once I even let him show me the little demo of

OSX

 , from what I saw very impressive, and probably for the end user very good .
Anyway after playing with it for 5 minutes I could not find the terminal prompt, so I got bored with it and wiped it out and installed

ubuntu

 

I use gnome, plain vanilla

ubuntu

  . I turn off all the animations etc, they piss me off .
For the backlight on lcd,keyboard you have to install special driver. And for wireless it will not set up right out of box. But if you are experienced

linux

  user no biggie.

All I run on my puter is several different types of editors (komodo,e

mac

 s,jedit ....), webbrowers etc. And I like to have several desktops, so I can like open a book on one, open a browser on another, and jump back and forth. So to be honest minimal window manager would do the trick .

Anyway the workman ship / design of the

mac

 book ap

pear

 s to be better then anything else out there. If I do not destroy it in one year I will be happy .

Anyway for your OS it just depends what works best for you. I stopped using windows totally 2 years ago. I just found i was more productive on

ubuntu

 . But I am guessing that things like your

iphone

 , pda etc probably do not work well with

ubuntu

 

@ Terminal (et al) - All of the tools you would have wanted are in Applications / Utilities.

Here's an interesting thought - put Leopard back on it (it's either that or Tiger) then install Parallels, which will let you run guest OS on the

mac

 hine at almost native speed - quite hot. I have an instance of RH9, FC6 and Windows XP that I use all the time. Handy thing: the images are all just a disk file, so copy them to another

mac

 hine and run your virtual instance there. In fact, if you purchase Parallels for

Linux

  as well, then you can run the disk image on that

mac

 hine also - so you could have a single instance of Windows that you run under both

OS-X

  and your

Linux

 

mac

 hine,

Linux

  on any of them... it's a nifty solution.

Parallels is a paid application (about $49 I think) but well worth it if you want different OSs to run seamlessly on your main box.

/p

I have never tried parallels, but vmware on my other laptop ran very well.
duo core is very important for this. the emulator will use 1 processor, while your regular apps use the other one (or that is what seemed to be happening).

OSX

  from what i read is a very good OS.
Bottom line,I am used to

ubuntu

 .

Ubuntu

  is stable, and does everything i need.
I do not need to connect to an

iphone

 , (i do not like telephones ), and i rarely leave my house, except for trips to the puter store .
I know all the quirks of

ubuntu

 , but with

OSX

  i would have to

learn

  a new OS, while gaining little.

I'm really just busting balls... I know that you know the right tools for your job and it sounds like you've got it nailed.

What ever run on your

mac

 book it is a good

mac

 hine.

Apple

  shop is kinda stupid when they sell it, they have the laptop right next to thier huge

apple

  monitor.
So when its display looks small. But when u take it home you find out how big 1400x900 really is.
Good thing they did not have in stock the one with the 17 inch screen . I would have to buy a remote keyboard.

What every OS you run on it, so far an impressive

mac

 hine.
As i said before it is all the little things they thought of.

If

OSX

  is based on openbsd/freebsd for you should be able to install a driver that allows you to run

linux

  binaries natively (you could with freebsd).
Since bsd and

linux

  are very similar the driver is just a set of thunks, so

linux

  apps run are almost 100% of native speed.

That's what I have... it's even big enough for PinkHat & me to watch movies together when we travel. It's kinda heavy tho... sometimes I am envious of PH's 15" and how much lighter and easier it was to find a good case for it.



I didn't know that... do you know for sure, and where is this driver?

If I had $$ to burn, I'd buy one of the tablet conversions for use for travel and have a

Mac

 Pro desktop for use @ home.  With a multi-core

mac

 hine and enough RAM I could get rid of every other computer in the house except for the SO's desktop.  I'm waiting for something the size of the Asus eeePC in tablet form-factor, or maybe 2-3x the size of the iPod Touch...e.g. the new Newton with a bare bones OS X.


I believe nop is talking about the

Linux

  compatibility layer/libs that you can install in *BSDs so that

Linux

  apps run without re-compiling.  I'm not sure that stuff will work under OS X due to the kernel differences.  A small correction, OS X incorporates a lot of code from FreeBSD (and

Apple

  contributes back).  The big difference afaik, is the

Mac

 h kernel, which is derived from NeXT.  There used to be a separate BSD project based on the

Apple

  code minus Aqua, called Darwin, but I think it's defunct these days.

Reference to the

Linux

  compat in FreeBSD: h++p://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/

linux

 emu.html

Perk, if you have some spare cycles you might want to test VMWare performance versus Parallels.  From what I understand it is faster.  I've been forbidden to use the SO's Intel

Mac

  as an experimental platform, so I haven't tried it out myself.  I'm still on a PPC

Mac

 .

Dependency issues are always a pain in the ass, and some distros manage them better than others.  That's why I prefer

Debian

 , package management is ever so much saner with apt-get than RPM based distros in my experience (my favorite RPM boondoggle: an older version of RH that had a broken version of RPM on fresh install...so much for QA).  These days you can't get away from

Linux

 , so I use it to keep it fresh.  I'm still a Sun

Solaris

  bigot for the "things must never break" situations, though.

=RT=

The rumor sites are starting to speculate just such a thing... some of the rumors are just wildly exciting actually...



I think, if you start up

OS-X

  in single-user/verbose mode it still says "darwin kernel" to this day. Thanks also, forgot about the

Mac

 h stuff...



Think you're right. Gonna give it some cycles, simply because I don't know enough. One of the sweetest things about Parallels is also "conherence mode" which I do not know if VMWare has... it essentially makes the guest OS apps windows on the

OS-X

  desktop just like anything else. Quite frightening, actually, to see IE running in (what looks like) native on the

Mac

  desktop. ::shudders:: Makes my medical clients (who know too much to

learn

  anything anymore  : ) vurrah happy.

Yah i was referring to the

linux

  emulation layer on the bsd series.
I thought that

OSX

  was just openbsd with just a fancy window manager ontop.
If not the case then will not work probably. (or you could make it work but be pretty hard )

The iPod touch is pretty close, if it wasn't so dinky <>and locked up like the

iPhone

 .  Let us all distort SJ's reality field by thinking "New Newton". 


OS X would be a lot easier to optimize if the

Mac

 h swap system wasn't so azzbackwards with those danged files.  They are a PITA to relocate.  At least it used to be a pain to move the swap files, it's been a couple of revs since I tried.  I really should slap a SCSI card/disk in my PPC desktop, and get my OS on a faster spindle, this thing is getting long in the tooth.


Given what I've heard about medical clients I can only imagine. I still have OS X IE 5 around here someplace...and then there was IE for

Solaris

  (seriously!)...  I'm pretty sure VMWare has something similar to coherence.  My take is that it performs better due to the maturity of the product. VMWare has been around for quite a while, it's just that "virtualization" has only started to take off in the last couple of years.

=RT=

Yes and no.. the Darwin kernel is built in XNU, which was the NextSTEP kernel.  It's a hybrid of

Mac

 h 3 and FreeBSD.  Essentially they used the process scheduling, memory management and IPC from

Mac

 h, and added FreeBSD for POSIX, unix processes, permissions,

net

 working, virtual file system, etc.  The created their own drivers system called I/O Kit -- which is a vast improvement on BSD and

Linux

 's drivers system.

So while it contains large parts of FreeBSD, it would require a decent amount of work to put the

linux

  emulation layer into the Darwin kernel.  On the other hand, vmware and parallels work quite nicely.