So I’ve been spending time playing with the UNIX parts of OS X. After spending a few minutes pulling my hair out due to chsh not working I took matters into my own hands. I use GLTerm instead of the default term application that came with OS X. After you “fink install bash” you can change the default shell in GLTerm’s preferencers to “/sw/bin/bash”. Then you’ll want to edit your .bashrc (note: “ln -s .bashrc .bash_profile” once yo uare done editing) and add PATH=$PATH:/sw/bin. You might want to modify your prompt as well. PS1=”[u@h w]n[W] $ ” worked well for me. Hope this helps someone.

Mozilla introduced me to “Tabbed Browsing” and my life hasn’t been the same since. Basically you have ONE window with tabs at the top. Each tab is labled with the title of the webpage in that tab. You can easily click through pages without having 50 browser windows open. It’s great! In fact tabbed browsing is SO great I’ve been looking into using MORE tabbed software. For instance, my AIM client, Adium, has a tabbed interface. One small AIM window with tabs at the top for each Buddy. It makes your desktop much less cluttered. If you know of a tabbed terminal for OS X let me know.

I just got the AirPort installed in the iBook. It’s super fatty – why everyone doesn’t have a wireless network I’ll never know. I bought a wireless router a few months ago in anticipation of getting a wireless computer and I must say it was worth the wait. Plus now that my college finally has wireless internet in the library and Paul has wireless at his house it should reduce one more cord from my life. My only question now is: Do they have Blue Tooth enabled mice?

I have some intial notes after having used OS X for a day. First off the dock rules. I also like Apple’s love of keyboard shortcuts (I thik there’s a shortcut to hack army.mil automatically). The GUI is intuitive, nice to work with, and snappy. I have two complaints. One, the USB ports are on the left side and the mouse cord is about 12 inches long – so if you’re not left handed you’re out of luck. Second, you can’t hide single windows. You either minimize (which makes your dock bigger) or hide ALL instances of that application. One thing that is TOO cool is that OS X applications come as mountable images – you just mount the thing, drag it onto the apps icon in your dock, and unmount the image by dragging it into the trash.

My new child has arrive. It came into my world at about 9:00am this morning. I couldn’t play with it right away because of outstanding circumstances, but as soon as those were cleared up I got down and dirty. My extra RAM came too, but I have yet to upgrade my iBook yet. I’m also awaiting my AirPort card, which will be a welcomed addition since I don’t have any decent sized network cables.

I have been using Paul’s Titanium PowerBook all night at his house (LAN Party). I’m getting used to OS X. It’s got a great GUI, is super fast, and has all the fun apps one likes on a computer. Too bad my iBook remains unaccessible to me despite being less than 10 miles from my apartment. Sigh.

Since my iBook is somewhere over the Pacific, I decided I could read some more reviews about it. I already read quite a few. I knew it would be great to do development on, but I began to get greedy wondering if it could play games as well. The answer is yes! A somewhat dated iBook review states that it plays UT and QuakeIII flawlessly (and this is with an 8mb ATI, mine has the 16mb ATI). I can’t seem to find out how fast the CDRW is though. I have seen reports the cdrom on the old ones was about 24x – but I got the DVD-CDRW combo … we’ll see I guess. I have 17 cd’s of data to burn from my workstation before I get rid of it.