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.

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

Utilities

Sources of Software for OS X