[NMUG] Darwinian nightmare

[Steven Jefferson]

Have you thought about Clix?

 From rixstep

Unix commands in a basic Mac GUI

Steven Jefferson
steve.jefferson at zen.co.uk



On 22 Oct 2009, at 06:57, Steve Batch wrote:

> Hi Ken thanks for your input, sorry for the slow reply, I've been
> working a lot of hours lately.
>
> Let me try to explain how I came to the obscure choice of Darwin:
>
> I want to use the Unix commands to complement and enhance my Mac
> experience so rather than just learning about standard functionality
> that is present on most Unix I actually want to learn about the
> additional Apple commands.  (I know these are useless outside of OS X,
> but that's ok).
>
> I want to feel in control of my OS and understand for myself what is
> happening for example when file permissions go screwy or an
> application behaves peculiarly without having to resort to third party
> application downloads that perform the task for me, when I know that I
> could simply carry out the task myself if I had a better understanding
> of the commands.
>
> I don't have a desire at the moment to configure a server but in the
> future that will most likely come up.
>
> I hear what you are saying about OS X not being the best place to
> start, I am now thinking that because I have forgotten pretty much all
> I learnt about Unix/Linux I should probably start from scratch and get
> up to speed with a basic Linux distribution and then move on to OS X
> once I have a better grasp.
>
> A friends once said that the best way to learn Linux is to complete a
> 'Linux from scratch' system <http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/> he
> swore by it saying he learnt so much from this approach.
>
> Steve.
>
>
> On 19 Oct 2009, at 22:45, Ken Hamer wrote:
>
>> Of all the many UNIX and UNIX-like "distributions", I would have
>> thought
>> that Mac OS X is about the worst one to use for learning UNIX
>> because of
>> the lengths Apple have gone to in hiding the operating system from  
>> the
>> user.  This gives the reliability and security advantages of UNIX
>> and a
>> very pretty, well-documented GUI but probably not the best UNIX
>> environment to study due to highly proprietary configuration
>> structures.
>>
>> The trouble with UNIX is that all versions are different from each
>> other.  There are many fundamental differences so you might want to
>> define what you want to learn about before choosing a distribution.
>
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