Fred's Home (Like we needed another home page)

Give me my disk back !
When I first started the brand new machine, less than one third of the disk was available. That's on a 30GB disk. Silly me figured that on a mobile machine, I'd never fill a 30GB disk since I'd have at least 20 or 24GB worth of disk space to play with. Hah.
Well I found a tool (called "Monolingual") that removes all the superfluous languages that come bundled with the system. All the hundreds of megs of them. I left a few European ones but I know I'm not going to learn Armenian any time soon. And while I'm not sure where Kanada is spoken, they probably don't eat fries with melted cheese and chicken gravy.
Anyway, I got 970 megs back. Not bad.
I also looked at the disk space taken by the stuff that comes with the machine. GarageBand just had to go (I don't have a garage anyway) along with its gigs of samples and assorted crud. Although now the biggest offender is the printer driver folder. It takes Gigs of disk space. For printer drivers. This is insane. I have to see how I can remove the damn thing without breaking anything and still keeping basic PCL and Postscript drivers.

Brittle mac already ?
Sometimes stuff breaks. While ripping audio CDs in iMusic (update: it's actually called iTunes, I can never remember the name of the damn thing), a CD failed to mount (or at least to show up on the desktop). If it isn't mounted, you can't eject it. Now there probably is some kind of arcane Emacs like key combo to forcefully eject it but it doesn't seem to be in the help system (and iBooks lack the little hole you could poke in to forcefully eject media on older Macs). It probably could be done from the command line but I forgot to go look (duh!). At any rate I'm not sure I could have figured the right device if a user friendly link à la /dev/cdrom didn't exist. So I shamefully rebooted. And the CD was there when I logged in again (whew!).
Another time, I ran that Unix OpenGL universe simulator where you can whizz around the solar system (and farther out) and view stuff from anywhere (can't remember what it's called). Anyway I ran the demo mode because the "go to object" isn't implemented in the Mac version and the machine froze solid when I clicked in the menu. I guess I could have switched to another console and killed the task but hey, it's a Mac, no consoles. :)
So I nuked the iBook with a 4 second press on the power button. Then I switched it on again. And damn. A lot, and I mean a lot of apps had lost their preferences. Plus all my Safari bookmarks were gone (all ten of them). Yay. Journalled filesystem indeed. Can I switch to Ext3 please?

The Web
I don't really like Safari. It's not that it's bad. It works ok, it's fast and all, but frankly, when you've used FireFox, Safari feels like some retarded cousin. Of course Firefox has the usual problem of non native apps, it takes quite a bit longer to load. It probably takes more RAM as well, but that's why I ordered the machine with more memory to begin with. I think Safari isn't going to be around for much longer.
Update :Stupid Firefox doesn't handle button 2 of the mouse (middle button) properly (scroll wheel works though) but you can't open a link in a tab by middle clicking. Major bummer. And a lot of extensions that depend on the second/third buttons are broken as well. I guess Safari will stay after all. Currently both are side by side in the dock.

Application installation
Most apps come as packages, which is brilliant. A package is just an archive which holds all the stuff the app needs in a number of files and directories. You drop it anywhere (ideally in the "applications" directory) and click on it to run the application. To get rid of the app, you just delete the package. A choice has been made between simplifying the whole dependency mess and wasting a bit of disk space. And since disk is so cheap nowadays… I believe they made the right choice. Dependency hell is a reality, a lot of users regularly have to go fish for libraries or applications outside of the packages provided by their distribution and that's all it takes to make their lives interesting.
Well, back to Mac OS. Some applications come with installers. I haven't yet figured why the installer is required and more importantly, I don't have the faintest clue as to how you remove those apps after you've installed them... Maybe it's easy and I have to understand the directory layout first.

Interface woes
I really miss not having a way to just send a window to the background (like I do by middle clicking on the frame in my usual KDE desktop). And having to use the bottom right corner to resize isn't all that convenient either… There might be ways around this, I'll have to look into it.
And I still regularly get bitten by the click to focus thing (like I do in Windows). And by having all the windows buttons on the same corner (I normally have close on the left and the rest on the right to avoid misclicks). And when I've spent a day working on the Mac, I find myself clicking all over the place when I'm back in Linux. Not good.

Making the interface work
Good point, I found a free virtual desktop app that's actually quite useable. Not as well integrated as what's usual in Unix, but way better than the hacks I've seen in Windows. It also has a selection of amusing and unobtrusive eye candy during desktop transitions in traditional Mac fashion. Google for Desktop Manager by Rich Wareham. Apparently if you feel like it, there also are a number of onerous alternatives.

Yes, please take all my money, I wasn't hungry anyway
It's a bit irritating how many things in the system are tied into commercial services such as Apple's .Mac online thing ($100 / year for webspace, wow! you do get an email address though). iPhoto pushes it (plus online photo printing services), iChat pushes it, iTunes pushes the iPod and the online music shop... It gets tiresome after a while. Maybe you're supposed to give in after a few months and just send them your credit card so they can help themselves to your bank account.
Oh yeah, take one of my kidneys while you're at it why don't you.

Hello ? Can you see me ?
I tried finding a webcam that works with Mac OS. What fun. According to Apple, there's only their iSight (at 150€, yeah, right). Actually I found a couple from Logitech starting around 60€. Still expensive. I have to check if they have decent Linux drivers though.
There's a hack for the crappy QuickCam Express I have that apparently sort of works. Except in iChat it seems. OTOH it seems that no free chat app supports video on the Mac except iChat and the Yahoo thing (there isn't any support on the Linux side either so I don't really know why I bother - and don't mention gnomemeeting). Should I wait for video support in Jabber or am I the only one trying to use Jabber anyway ?

The disk maze
The directory structure is twofold. There is the user side which you can browse through the finder (apparently it's rewritten on the fly according to the language preferences and other misc. voodoo) and the "real" structure which you can only see through a shell. As a side note, the real tree is quite disconcerting from a Unix point of view. A lot of it is very familiar, but a lot of it is very weird and only very loosely tied into the traditional Unix directory tree. There's /Volumes which seems to be a bit like /mnt, /Users which seems to be like /home, /System which is just full of Apple weirdness, /private holds etc, tmp and var (all of which are also symlinked at the root)… Weird I tell you.

Device tricks
Some of the stuff in /dev is pretty neat. For example I registered my bluetooth phone with the laptop and now I have a /dev/tty.Fredphone-SerialPort-1 (the phone is called Fredphone). Some of the rest is the usual obscure stuff, for example I have no idea what /dev/bpf[0-3] is. Maybe it's documented somewhere.

Managing the trackpad
Someone showed me an app called "iScroll2" which lets you scroll in most apps (most native apps at least) both vertically and horizontally (although documents that can scroll both ways tend to jump around quite a bit) by using two fingers side by side on the trackpad. It is better if you just disable horizontal scrolling which isn't used as often. AND you can (more or less) "right click" on stuff by using both fingers and clicking. It usually doesn't work on text because the scrolling is too sensitive (even at the lowest setting) but it works well enough on static things (like desktop icons) so it's better than nothing. Now I don't have to pull my mouse out as often as before and I can get that many more minutes out of the battery. The trackpad is now a bit more useable.

Live with the times
The default charset on the Mac appears to be a thing called "Mac Roman" (I couldn't figure what the proper ISO name was). Why they didn't switch to Unicode like the rest of the world is a mystery to me. In most applications, Latin-9 (ISO-8859-15), the current standard in France and quite a bit of western Europe isn't even an option. Yay, way to go for i18n.
And my locale in the terminal is "C" (which usually translates as ASCII, a seven bit charset which was in use back when the planet was still cooling). So no Unicode there either apparently. Accented filenames aren't displayed by "ls" but they are by Bash file completion. So I don't know how the hell this is handled. Apparently each application does as it pleases internally. What the system does is a mystery.

The Mac is Unix, really, it says so in the brochure
Getting Unix software to work on the Mac isn't all that simple. The DarwinPorts are one way, Fink is another (getting the source and editing it until it will compile — and again until it runs — is yet another but I won't get into that). Some software is available on both. Some is available on just one. So you have to install both. Way to go. Oh and the fink people came up with this great idea of putting their stuff in /sw/bin (ports stuff ends up in /opt which is more acceptable). If I ever write Mac software, I think I'll put it in /Fred/Bin (I think the capital on Bin makes it more trendy). Hey, everybody else is doing it…
Anyway I grabbed the fink install package from the Apple website and after the tens of megs of download, it said "sorry, OS 10.2 only" (current version is 10.4.something, and this was from the Apple website, the people who make the damn software index). So maybe the directory thing has been fixed on the current version. Assuming that there even is a current version. I'll see if I ever get around to downloading the thing again. So far I just need fink for Scribus, but I'm starting to wonder if I want it that bad… Time will tell… DTP on a 12" screen isn't that hot anyway, not after I did it on the PictureBook (1024x480) while on vacation last winter. Just compiling the damn thing took five hours.

Bouncy
The iBook keyboard boouncees a wee bit. I hatte thaat.

Onwards to part 3