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

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2007, Fairlight wrote:
>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?

It's sometimes a convenient way to distribute a directory of stuff.  When
we install our OpenPKG packages on a new system, it's usually by doing a
``mount -o loop file.iso /mnt'' then going to the /mnt directory to run the
install script.

>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.

I've only had to get down and dirty in the OS a few times, most recently
patching SCSI drivers to recognize various scanners.  Before that it was
patching Burroughs MCP on Medium Systems to fix a bug in their RJE (Remote
Job Entry) pseudo card reader handling (after I fixed this and a some bugs
in their RJE software I had no problem when I wanted something from
Burroughs engineering support :-).

>> 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.

The .dmg files are what are created if one creates a disk image file with
native tools on OS X.  You can easily create read-write disk images on
OS X, and use them as mounted file systems.  This can be a handy way to
handle encrypted file systems, and I've used them to create case-sensitive
UFS files systems on machines where I couldn't partition a real hard disk.

>> 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.
>
...
>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...

Mutt handles IMAP and POP3 OK, but the mail that I get in the .Mac and AIM
boxes tends to be HTML rather than plain-text so Thunderbird makes it
easier to read.

I fire up dedicated xterms for mutt from a python tKinter program (the one
with the little biff mailboxes).  Clock on the mailbox, and it fires off an
xterm with mutt.  The python script monitors each Maildir folder for new
messages, raising the flag as necessary.

I wrote the python routine mostly as to get familiar with tKinter
programming (it was a rewrite of a perl::Tk version I had written years ago
while learning perl::Tk :-).

Bill
--
INTERNET:  bill at Celestial.COM   Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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