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Unix For Mac OS X (DOC)
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Unix for Mac OS X
“What is Unix?
Unix controls your Mac. It controls the processor, the memory, the file system, the network, and all your peripherals. And it does so rather well. Unix gives you network and internet connectivity, and powerful file system management. It gives you a host of useful utilities to help you get your work done. It provides an environment in which multiple applications, and multiple users, may co-exist without tripping over each other - something sorely lacking in Mac OS 9.”
Mac OS X Unix Tutorial, http://www.osxfaq.com/Tutorials/LearningCenter/
Mac OS X is based on Darwin
“Beneath the easy-to-use interface and rich graphics of Mac OS X is Darwin, an open source UNIX-based foundation built on technologies such as FreeBSD, Mach, Apache, and GCC. Darwin provides a complete UNIX environment, with X11 and POSIX services comparable to Linux or FreeBSD, including familiar kernel, libraries, networking and command-line utilities.”
Useful Commands (use man to get more information):
man format and display the on-line manual pages (ex: “man ls”)
ls list directory contents
~/ From home directory
./ from current directory
cd change directory
top display and update sorted information about processes
ssh OpenSSH SSH client (remote login program)
reboot reboot, halt - stopping and restarting the system
kill terminate or signal a process
killall kill processes by name
rm remove files or directories
Terminal Tips
Drag the file/folder to add it to a command
Choose the Window Settings to Green on Black, and adjust the transparency to allow you to view behind your terminal sessions.
X11-
The X Window System is a network transparent window system which runs on a wide range of computing and graphics machines. X11 has primitives which are useful for the creation of graphical desktops (e.g., Windows, Colors, Displays, Screens).
OS X comes with an X11 program to run these from.
Common X11 apps
OpenOffice - Office suite. (www.openoffice.org)
AbiWord - Word processor
Ethereal- network analyzer
KDE - a deskop windows manager
GNOME - another desktop windows manager
GIMP - Photoshop like graphics program (www.gimp.org)
ssh -X -C username@hostname to connect remotely, securely with compression. Host needs some setup
search www.macosxhints.com for X11
How to Get Apps - package managers
Fink - fink.sourceforge.net
DarwinPorts - darwinports.opendarwin.org
XCode - Apple's free development environment, needed to build some applications. (http://developer.apple.com/tools/xcode/)