Three days with OS X: the good and the bad
By Daniel on Friday 7 December 2007, 22:24 - Gadgets - Permalink
A short update on my first experiences with OS X. I had some pretty urgent work this week, and the good news is that I had no real problems getting stuff done. First off was a presentation that I had to finish. I prefer the LaTeX beamer document class for presentations over anything else. It lets me work on the actual content of slides, rather than formatting, and the class defaults are very sane in that they create very nice-looking slides. The MacTeX distribution was easy to set up, and provides TeX-live, Ghostscript, and some related stuff you may need.
The first less surprise came up running Mercurial, my favorite distributed SCM:
$ hg
[...]
raise ValueError, 'unknown locale: %s' % localename
ValueError: unknown locale: UTF-8
This can be worked around by setting the LANG variable to 'c'. Of course, this is a bad solution, I still have to look into this. Though this is a minor problem compared to disk images (dmgs), let's state it right away: disk images suck! For the non-OS X user: these are images that get mounted when you click on them. Most third party software vendors provide their software as these disk images. Installation is usually done by opening the disk image, copying the disk image to the Applications directory, and unmounting the disk image. Besides the fact that you have to download disk images manually, application upgrades seem to be manually (usually). E.g. a security update was released for the Camino browser. I had to download the new disk image, open it, copy the new Camino folder to Applications folder, close the disk image. This is many steps back from APT and yum, where you can not only install your applications from repositories, but upgrade them with a single command as well. With Synaptic wrapped around it, APT is even very usable for non-expert users.
Yes, I know of the existance of Fink. Once they offer binary Leopard packages, I'll try it, because I'd be very happy to have a decent package manager. At least for the opensource applications that are usually provided with Linux distributions.
Comments
You're completely right about the disk images.
Coincidentally, I thought today it was time to upgrade the existing Firefox 1.5 on this iBook to FF 2 (could have done that quite a while ago, obviously). I had to download a Firefox .dmg file, then agree to the Mozilla license, then perform some weird kind of action Apple style consisting of dragging a Firefox icon to an "applications" icon.
No idea if that latter action succeeded, usually you get some kind of a confirmation things are done, didn't look like it did, but then I suddenly did end up with a running FF2.
However, there was still another disk image mounted with the same icon on the desktop. This turned out to be FF1.5, although I had used Safari to download the FF2 .dmg, and in the dock the FF icon was 1.5 too. After having mounted ("installed") FF2.0, I had to
-check (by means of right click / Ctrl click > "get info") which Firefox which identical .dmg icon belonged to
-unmount the 1.5 one (first failed, FF1.5 seemed to be running)
-killing FF 1.5 and unmounting the .dmg
-removing the FF 1.5. icon from the dock
-dragging the FF 2 icon to the dock again (first didn't work, then typed Firefox in the "Spotlight" thingie and dragged the result to the dock).
Now I can run FF2.
Some of the stuff I had to do manually would never be tolerated if this was a Linux distribution - if a Linux user can't find a, say, Opera or Google Earth entry+icon in the apps menu after having installed it, they will be pissed off and write in their blog how much Linux Isn't Ready! ;)
All of this is something that Apple might call "intuitive", but I have this gut feeling that the way yum or similar programs would handle this is, indeed, more elegant.
You can still do a port install blabla of course, if you install all of the stuff to enable that. (And sure, Fink.)
If I remember correctly it took me a full GB to install the Apple developer stuff with the compilers etc. I remember I had to do that to install some programs such as Open Office (needing X11) and a few other open source programs I needed. For obtaining all the stuff to compile X11 I had to become an "Apple developer" or something, and had to download a huge package, the download location for which was sent to me by e-mail. (I'm not running OO.org a lot lately because there is NeoOffice now, but all of this makes you appreciate the efforts of a linux developer community with its repos etc.)
I wonder how that is with Leopard these days, I felt it could have been a lot easier.
I also used Fink occasionally, worked well for what I installed with it (don't remember what it was) on Tiger.
Yes it's fun, to be Linux user in Apple land.
One other thing that is a pity before I forget, is the file system trap - OS X doesn't natively support ext3, which I forgot to think about when I put an ext3 on my external hard drive. There finally came a good driver for Tiger to mount ext2/3 partitions but then I mount it and It Just Won't Work (here). This makes the iBook useless for the external drive, but I couldn't stand the Fat32 fs anymore. It should work, so I will take another look at that.
Keep in mind there are also things I do like about OS X. ;)
For future google searchers: The LANG set by Terminal.app in Leopard to 'UTF-8' is not valid, and should be considered a bug. disable the lang setting in Terminal and just set the LANG manually in .profile or .bashrc or whatever you like. It should be formated like en_US.UTF-8 or the country, encoding and language of your choosing.