OT: You OS/X Users...question for ya...

[Fairlight]

Simon--er, no...it was Bill Campbell--said:
> Why bother?  Macs handle standard .zip files just fine, and they
> can be created on pretty much any *nix box, and probably Windows
> as well using open source software.  Macs can also deal with
> standard ISO files -- clicking on them in the Finder will
> automatically mount them.

Making an ISO for a 60MB file, for instance (60, not 600), is a bit of
overkill, don't you think?

If zip's fine now, then that's cool.  I might still splurge on the .mov
encoding booster.

> Those files are automatically created under OS X when files are
> on UFS (Unix File System) or other non-Apple file systems.  The
> metadata in the resource forks is hidden when using the Apple
> file systems.

You used to have to go to hell and back to actually -get- at the forks.

> The older Apple file systems aren't case sensitive, and I use a
> case-sensitive UFS partition for all source code and development
> (it took me about an hour to find things broken by their lack of
> case sensitivity trying to build software I've been using on *nix
> systems for 20+ years :-).  When I installed OS X 10.4 Tiger on

HFS is evil.  I had the dubious "pleasure" of actually patching the linux
HFS module when the maintainer vanished for a while and kernel revisions
broke it.  He picked up after a while and I was gratified to see that all
my fixes were indeed accurate.  :)  That's like my one kernel patch that
wasn't keymap related, but actual code.

> OS X can handle .sit files now, but I haven't seen much within
> the last couple of years distributed in .sit files.  Many
> programs are distributed as .dmg disk images (similar to ISOs).

What creats .dmg, dare I ask?  Actually, I wonder if Nero does.  That looks
awfully familiar from when I was dinking with it yesterday.  What else
creates them?  Still sounds like overkill when a simple zip will do.

> One session doesn't do me much good when I'm connecting to a
> dozen or more systems.  Putty doesn't do me much good as I don't
> have any Windows systems and ssh with xterms does everything I
> need quite nicely.  My normal e-mail reader is mutt in xterms.

I'm on seven systems right now, through just the one internal one.  The key
wasn't PuTTY, the key was screen(1)...that's what makes life bearable.  It
works just as well in an xterm.  Actually, when I still booted my desktop
to linux (when my desktop still actually had a linux partition!...last
incarnation of the hardware), I used to use it to switch between VC's
and xterms all the time...just 'screen -dr' and *poof*.  And still stay
connected to IRC, my shell account, all the remote systems I'm into, and a
couple more sessions.  I keep 10 screens up in one window at all times--8
for fairlite, 2 for root (which hardly ever get used, but on occassion...).

> When I click on a mailbox in the column on the right side of my
> desktop, it runs ``xterm -e mutt -f ~/Maildir/.$foldername'' to
> read the mail in that folder.  Once a day I may read e-mail with
> Thunderbird, primarily to get messages where I want to click on
> URLs in the message body and to access my .Mac and AIM mailboxes.

Can't speak to .Mac or AIM mailboxes, but if they have pop3 support, mutt
supports pop3 if you tell it to--their one concession to MTA-ishness.  And
why fire up a dedicated xterm for mutt?  I tried that once but it annoyed
me immensely.  I just keep mail in an ssh session on the ISP server on
screen 1 at all times and hit F2 when I want to go there.  I mapped my
function keys so that F1-F8 are all fairlite on Cobalt (although I may be
ssh'd in from any of those to anywhere and everywhere), F9-F10 are root,
F11 spawns a new local ssh, and F12 spawns an ssh to my ISP.  And the two
root sessions are acl'd off of multiuser so nobody can ever see them, much
less use them, if I happen to let someone attach for a tutorial.

mark->
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