Unix software on Mac OS X....

[albertlee]

Have you guys ever tried Unix software on Max OS X??

 

Albert

[5614]

no not personally, why?

[albertlee]

I have tried FreeBSD on my own X86 computer, and I feel quite touchy about its configuration menu since it is very un-user-friendly.....

 

By the way, I also feel abit despair that some of my hardware are not supported by FreeBSD....

 

but fortunately I am going to get a MacMini for my birthday present, and since Mac OS X is unix based, I am conjecturing that it has the easy-to-use, user-friendly interface, and the flexibility of UNIX....

 

what do guys think??

 

but I feel quite absurd, that, on FreeBSD, the graphical program runs under X window, if I run a graphic unix program on Mac OS X, will the program just run normally like running a Mac Program, or there is a X window in Mac OS X???

 

Albert

[Dave]

First off: FreeBSD is not supposed to be user-friendly. It's supposed to be rock solid stable and a good server platform.

 

About your questions: for UNIX apps which require XFree, you can download a Mac OS X compatible version from apple. There's also a bunch of scripts and utilities which you can use to build packages of common UNIX software (but don't know any links unfortunately).

[1veedo]

I personally have disabled XWindows. If you install Linux, tell it not to install xwindows.

 

Just a matter of preference of course...

[Dave]

If you want a gui, you don't really have a lot of choice

[Silencer]

and it's called X, or maybe Xorg or XFree, but not "X windows." "X windows" is a horrible bastardization that people stuck in the Microsoft world can't get over.

 

And as dave said, good luck using it as a desktop system without X.

[albertlee]

so, Silencer, can you do anything you want on unix computer with x???

How about listening to music, typing words, drawing a picture???

 

By the way, what is the difference of 'x' and 'x windows'???

 

thx

 

Albert

[Dave]

music - try xmms, rhythmbox for a start

typing - try openoffice

drawing - gimp is rather good

 

Nobody's saying it's possible to do everything under X, but there's rather a lot of apps out there. I finished my install of gentoo last night, and I have quite a lot of nice apps running under xfce4 (which is rather nice).

 

The difference between X and "X windows" is that X is the right way of saying it and "X windows" is wrong. That's the only real way of explaining it It's called the X server after all, not the "X Windows" server.

[albertlee]

oh, sorry, I mean

 

can you do anything you want on unix computer without x???

 

as dave suggested, "If you want a gui, you don't really have a lot of choice"

 

Any body??

 

thx

 

Albert

[Dave]

Well, within reason I suppose you can. There's plenty of applications that utilise things like ncurses to give a rudimentary text interface as well as the command line apps out there.

 

In relation to your examples:

drawing - you can use imagemagick utilities to manipulate images from the command line, you just can't see them

writing - use something like pico/ee/whatever takes your fancy

playing music - mpg123 is an extremely low-cpu mp3 decoder that will play from the command line (obviously you have to have your soundcard set up properly first).

[Silencer]

There are a lot of things you can do. For example, running a firewall, router intrusion detection system, web server, or anything of that ilk won't require a GUI. In fact, running X would just waste CPU cycles that should be going to the main operation.

 

An extremely hardcore person could use just the command line as their desktop system, but with much effort and sacrifice. You can browse the web (text only!) using 'links.' You can edit text with pico/nano, vi, or a bunch of others. You can chat on IRC with BitchX. I didn't think that there were any music players, but evidently dave knows one.

 

I haven't seen an AIM client that will run in the terminal. That would be pretty difficult and tedious.