Mac OS X 10.2 and 10.3 Installation Notes
Caveat!
These are notes compiled from information I've gathered on the
web and elsewhere, but mileage may vary.
Basic Installation
It's a snap, really nothing to it. Here's are some
suggestions.
- Use softlinks from the CLI instead of aliases in the Finder.
Softlinks are understood by Finder, the CLI, carbon apps, and cocoa
apps (but not classic apps). Aliases aren't understood by the
CLI.
- Install the developer's tools that come on the second cd, this
package includes a number of unix utilities that come in
handy.
Partitions
My favorite setup is three partitions-one for swap, a smallish partition large enough to hold MacOS 9
with some free space, and one large partition with OS X and data.
By default, OS X uses the main system partition for swap, and this
means that your swap files will be spread across that partition,
which can slow the system down over time (unless you regularly defragment the drive). For basic system swap, allocating 2.5 times the amount of ram you have seems to work well, but you may want to make the swap space larger in case you want to upgrade ram later. Resexcellence has a
nice article on how to do this. On large ram systems you may
need more space
Playing Nicely with Others
One of the tricks is getting your mac to connect with other flavors of machines. Fortunately, with the unix core this is easier than ever. Here are some tips to get you started.
Securing your Mac
OS X is a flavor of unix, so you'll need to take more
precautions with it than one does with earlier versions. Here's some notes on securing your
machine.
Software you may want to add
Applications
- Fugu is a
free SFTP client
- Fetch is a free FTP
client for educational and charitable organizations.
- Mulberry is one of the
best imap clients out there. Once particularly nice feature is the
adminstration utility, you can use that to configure restricted use
installations for use in labs or shared machines. In kiosk mode,
users are restricted to whatever server you choose and no data is
store locally. UNC has a site license for it, contact software@unc.edu for more
information.
Utilities
- Vercruesse has a couple
of nice utilities for controlling the dock location and for
providing an application menu like that used in Mac OS 9 and
earlier.
-
Subsume also has some nice programs, mostly oriented to the
programmer. But for users I particularly recommend InstantLinks,
which provides a set of services that service aware applications
can use including an address to map translation, web based
dictionary and encyclopedia lookup for selected text.
- Zingg is a
contextual menu add on that lets you choose from a list of
applications that claim to be able to open a given file.
Sources of Software for OS X