Last updated: February 23, 2006
My First Macintosh
Introduction
In all my years with computers (almost 21 as a professional, and almost 30 as a hobbyist), I've never really used a Macintosh. Oh, I used to play with the original Macs that they used to set in front of the science stores at the malls, and would write my name in script using MacPaint, but never seriously "used" one until now.
The perspective here is from a Unix administrator and programmer who also knows quite a bit about Microsoft Windows, and is a regular user of a Sun workstation running Solaris 10 and an IBM ThinkPad R51 running Windows XP Professional.
First Steps
I received my hand-me-down Power Mac G4 on Wednesday, February 15, complete with monitor, keyboard, and hockey puck mouse. I wanted to start from scratch, so I obtained a new copy of Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger. A co-worker, Jonathan, gave me the first piece of magic information I'd need, namely that you hold down the "c" key to get the Mac to boot from the DVD.
Instead of going through the default install, I decided to check out each option along the way. I'm glad I did, because I found that the installation of the X11 software packages is turned off by default, which is something I think I'm really going to need. Other than that, it was pretty easy (as I'd expected).
One of the first things I wanted to do is to get to some shares on our Samba server. Jonathan advised me to go into the "Directory Access" utility and make sure the SMB/CIFS service was checked, then configure it to set the Workgroup and WINS server options appropriate for our network. My co-worker Phil walked me through creating the "/etc/nsmb.conf" file, which needs to be there so that simpler password authentication can be enabled. These are the contents that are supposed to go into it for our environment:
[default] minauth=none
The other piece of the puzzle was how to actually go about accessing a share. Browsing the network from Finder didn't seem to do much good, but then I found via Google that I needed to go to the "Go" menu and select "Connect to Server...", then enter the server name and share, starting with "smb://". That worked, and I was able to get to my files. Here's something I find curious: Apple tries really hard to insulate you from the internals of things, yet they expect you to know whether or not a particular server is a "real" Windows server or a Samba server, and enter either "cifs://" or "smb://" in the URL, respectively. Sorry, but I find that a little odd.
Oh, the other thing I did was to do a software update, which put me at Mac OS X version 10.4.5. More about this later.
Installing Software
I quickly figured out that when you want to install software such as Firefox, you download these virtual disk images identified as ".dmg" files, double-click on them to mount them, then launch the installer found in them. However, in some cases, the installer really doesn't do an install, but runs the software locally from inside the .dmg file. This is the case with Firefox, Camino, and several other packages I tried to install. I thought it was suspicious that they didn't get added to the Finder's "Applications" area, and found later that the proper way is to drag the install icon to the Applications area. Not exactly obvious to me, but I can deal with it. :-)
Microsoft Office 2004 installed without a hitch, as I expected, and created nice new icons on the dock. One thing I don't see in Finder is any kind of contextual "New Microsoft Word Document" like one finds in Windows. More about that later.
Experimenting with the software that comes with Mac OS X 10.4, I eventually tried the DVD Player, and found that it would not play the DVD I brought in (Disc 4 of MST3K Collection Volume 7, containing "The Killer Shrews" plus bonus shorts "Assignment: Venezula", "Century 21 Calling", and "A Case of Spring Fever", but I digress). I Googled on the error message, "Supported Disc Not Available", and in a few minutes had the answer. It turns out that it's a good practice to always launch the "Disk Utility" and run the "Repair Disk Permissions" option whenever you get OS updates from Apple, and, as I had mentioned earlier, I had updated my operating system to version 10.4.5 shortly after installation. I ran this utility, and noted that it reported problems with a few files, including some belonging to the DVD Player application. When it finished, I tried again, and my DVD played just fine.
Free software I installed included Firefox, Camino, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, Adobe Reader 7.0.7, Flash Player 8.0.22.0, Shockwave Player 10.1.0.11, Gimp.app 2.2.10, and Yahoo! Widgets 3.0.2, and I had no problems with any of them, once I understood that for some you need to drag the icon to the "Applications" area. (for fellow staff members, I put the .dmg files for these in "\\sens_eng\sens\staff\Macintosh").
OS Tweaking
I turned on SSH support, because I want to be able to remote log in and do Unix-type things, and found that Mac OS X comes with a firewall. Cool. The only thing I found deficient is that from the graphical interface one can't restrict access to services by IP address or subnet. This can only be done by going to a Unix shell and running arcane "ipfw" commands. This is too bad, and something that Windows XP does quite well. There is a shareware program named Flying Buttress (formerly BrickHouse) that provides this capability in a nice interface, and maybe this is a case where Apple doesn't want to step on the toes of third-party developers.
It seems that the Dashboard is always on. It starts up when you log in, even if you are not using it or don't intend to use it, and consumes a not-insignificant amount of memory and CPU. There's a bunch of dialogue on this topic if you Google for it, and I found a nice solution on this web page. Just open the file "DisableEnableDashboard.dmg" and drag the two icons to your desktop, or to another convenient location.
Interface Impressions
I want to clarify right off the bat that there is no concept of "good" or "bad" in this section. These are reflections of my experiences with the Mac, in some cases contrasted with experiences on Unix or Windows systems, but in no way intended to convey a feeling of "better" or "worse". Any failure of understanding the Mac OS UI is almost certainly my fault, not the system's.
First off, I have a really hard time getting used to the fact that the menu bar for the application I'm using is at the top of the screen instead of the top of the window. It is common in every X Window or Microsoft Windows system I've used to put the menu pulldowns at the top of the active window. The Mac OS method implies to me a context shift for the entire desktop when switching between application windows. I'm sure I'll get the hang of this once I train my eyes to look in a different place for the menus, but it's strange right now.
I also can't shake this feeling that while Microsoft Windows has gotten more document-centric, Mac OS has shifted to a more application-centric view. Here's what I mean: I remember old Mac OS 6.x and 7.x systems as presenting a desktop of document icons, and you clicked on one to launch the application with which it was associated (Word, Excel, or whatever). With MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, on the other hand, you typically launched the application, then used the "File->Open" menu to access a particular document. Now, it seems that Windows XP wants you to view the computer as a set of documents, while Mac OS X presents you with a dock of applications that you can launch. Even in the context of creating new documents, Windows XP and Microsoft Office want you to click and create a new document on the desktop and open it, and I don't see anything similar in Mac OS (maybe I'm just missing something here, though). Again, this is not a "better" or "worse" issue, just an observation that I consider kind of interesting.
I like the dock, and am a sucker for special effects like the bouncy icons. One thing that I didn't find obvious was that the little triangles under some of the icons mean that they are running; in Windows XP, program launchers are either in the "Start" menu or the Quick Launch bar, and running applications are in the task bar. I'm not opposed to having both in the dock; all I'm saying is that the little triangles were not an obvious indicator to me. Also, I really wish there was an "undo" for when you accidentally drag an icon out of the dock and it goes "poof". Not a biggie, but I'm always an advocate of more "undo" features.
Let's talk for a minute about the one-button mouse. Please. After installing Yahoo! Widgets, I could not for the life of me figure out how to access the context windows for the widgets. In Windows XP, this is done using the right mouse button, but my Macintosh only has a single button. OK, Mac folks are probably screaming "Hold down Control and click" right about now, but I don't find this at all obvious. In my mind, the keyboard and mouse are two separate entities, and it is not obvious that pressing a button on the keyboard would influence the behavior of the mouse. Now that Apple has embraced multi-button mice, this point may become moot, but I thought I'd bring it up anyways, because I'm not exactly a neophyte in computing, and if I had a hard time figuring this out, how hard is it for newbies? Or isn't it?
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