Linux is where I came from. Mac OS X is where I am. It's been almost a year since I originally wrote this guide, and Panther brings us Unix fans even more of the Unix tools we love in the standard way we love them.
I'm going to attempt to keep track of applications I have installed other than those that come with Panther.
Not a separate download, but I'd like to mention that with the new Finder in Panther, I find it useful to differentiate spatial Finder (Aqua) from browser Finder (Metal). When I add an alias to my desktop, I open the folder and then click the pill in the upper-right. That turns the browser Finder window into a spatial Finder window. Finder will remember the exact window size and location for that alias and any subfolders. When I open things off the desktop, I can navigate through them spatially. When I click the Finder icon in my Dock, I get the browser Finder. It works for me.
Panther now comes with Apple's X11.app, based on XFree86 4.3. If you want to change what happens when X11 starts, simply create a ~/.xinitrc with whatever commands you want. End each command with && or ; and be sure to include exec /usr/X11R6/bin/quartz-wm if you want Apple's window manager to start.
Want to create an encrypted resizeable disk image to store files in? Use hdiutil create DiskName -size 1g -encryption -type SPARSE -fs HFS+ -volname DiskName. 1g can be replaced with whatever you'd like the maximum disk image size to be. The size of the file will automatically grow up to that maximum size as you add things to the disk image.
A lot of the tools that Apple has created for OS X are available from the console as well, here's a short list of some of the ones I know of:
Just can't get away from that Linux software you miss? While pretty much every Mac OS X user on the planet would recommend Fink, I highly recommend DarwinPorts. It's very easy to write new ports for it.
HFS+ journaling can be enabled or disabled using Disk Utility.app. It can also be done from the commandline with sudo diskutil enableJournal / (replace enable with disable for the reverse, obviously). Journaling has a minor impact on disk write speeds. Fresh Panther installs have it enabled by default.
Unconfirmed (I do not know the full ramifactions of modifying these variables)&8212;Supposedly with BSD, the optimal settings for network throughput (i.e., when you have lots of bandwidth and are not on a 56k modem) are something like:
Also, Apple's default settings for the number of files to be open in memory at once are supposedly optimal for 256 megs of ram. If you have more than 512, the setting should be something more like sudo sysctl -w kern.maxvnodes=84672. I need to do further research on these BSD kernel settings to be certain that they do not have negative side effects. I think Apple was just being conservative. I should also compare Jaguar's default values of these settings to Panther's.
Panther has bash as the default shell now! Yey!
Getting color ls is as simple as adding
CLICOLOR=1to your ~/.bash_profile. Make sure Terminal->Preferences has your $TERM set to xterm-color.
export CLICOLOR