serinde

For those who are not actual Windows fans (yes, these exist), nor overly concerned about having the source to their entire system, I really can't see any downside to switching to Mac. Since Mac OS X came out, I've switched my entire family (5 seats) plus my own household (2 seats), and everyone is satisfied. It's not suitable for some specific needs, but as a general computing platform -- well, it's UNIX<tm> with a well-thought-out graphical interface; what's not to like?

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Oh, I forgot to say: nice choice of userpic.

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lillilah

Holy shit! I know you! I saw a photo with you in it just the other day and thought, "I wonder what he is up to." Yay!

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Hi Felicia! I am living in Berkeley with Suzanne, who's working on a Ph.D in Comparative Literature at Cal. I'm still doing email server work. What photo did you see?

And you?

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lillilah

This picture->http://pics.livejournal.com/bychoice/pic/000x4s5s/g5
Terrible photo, terrible scan, but still nice to have the photo.

I'm living in Eugene still, married to Joel. I had some neurological problems while in the Peace Corps and am still on disability (although I'm doing much better and we expect I'll be back in working order in a couple of years).

If you are ever up my way, let me know. I'd love to see you guys! Say hi to Suzanne for me. Sounds like things are going well for you. Yay!

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The downside is if you have any Windows-only games.

I'm not a game player, but I'm seriously not getting on well with MacOS X. It's not designed for how I want to use it, unfortunately.

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Games are included in what I meant by "some specific needs" ...

How is Mac OS X annoying you?

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Big annoyances;

font size... the thing isn't designed to be used on a 42" 1080p monitor from a distance of 9 foot. Some things just end up being hard to read. This renders the GUI almost unusable.

automounter... doesn't. Or sometimes doesn't, anyway. Let's say I have /mp3 automounted from my file server. I ssh into the machine, and can cd /mp3 and it works just fine. I can play music from it in itunes. Wonderful. I logout of the ssh session. I quit itunes. A few hours later I try to play music in itunes again. Nothing! Nada! No error message, just doesn't play. Login, "df" shows /mp3 is NOT mounted. "cd /mp3" and it mounts and everything plays again. Somehow somewhere iTunes (probably via Carbon) is getting an error trying to open the mp3s and the automounter isn't being tickled to remount the drive. This bug also impacts Front Row, since that uses iTunes to play music.

DVD Player... is poor quality. Even taking the craptistic apple remote into account, the quality of the output is poor. One example was Flash Gordon; at the beginning as Ming targets the Earth we see red lightning bolts come in from the corners. On my real 1080i upconverting DVD player the edges are smooth, but on the Mac there are definite stepping jagged edges.

iTunes doesn't understand FLAC. Or Ogg. Let along ogg wrapped FLAC :-(

Minor issues such as historical hysterical things floating around that don't seem to do anything. eg /etc/rc references /etc/rc.local but if I create one then it doesn't actually seem to be used. I haven't bothered to spend much time with that; it's a minor annoyance.

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I have the same problem with font sizes. I'm using a laptop with a higher-than-usual resolution. Supposedly a resolution-independent GUI is in the works, but in the mean time, I use ctrl-scrollwheel to zoom the screen sometimes, especially when I'm reading Doonesbury.

Dunno about automounter. It might be interesting to try to track down the problem. Maybe lock jdev in a room with your computer and a bottle of Mountain Dew ... ? :-) As far as workarounds go, have you considered ditching NFS for some ... less kludgetastic remote filesystem?

Do you get any better results with VLC than with DVD Player?

Apple's music offerings are obnoxiously closed. It's not just the file formats -- there's lots of hardware that you basically can't use except with iTunes (AirTunes, iPod, iPhone). I kind of give them a pass on this because it's a lot of new stuff and there isn't really any competition, and no market leader would behave otherwise -- but only kind of; those aren't good reasons.

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What file system would you recommend? For read-only shares, NFS isn't that bad. Besides, the automounter is the issue, not the file system.

VLC has different but equally bad artificts.

I don't forgive Microsoft for their closed shit (I wish I could sync my phone with Linux, but oh no... needs M$ ActiveSync), so I don't forgive Apple, either. Being a market leader doesn't mean you can't _also_ implement open standards (FLAC as well as AAC, for example). Indeed, if the iPod and iTunes supported FLAC/OGG and Linux then I might have bought a 160Gb Classic. But I won't because it won't work with my preferred setup.

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I'm guessing that Apple has put the most work into correct behavior with AFS (because it's theirs) and SMB (because they have been pushing Windows interoperability very hard).

Bummer about VLC. I find it hard to believe that there's no decent DVD decoder for Mac OS X ... there's got to be something.

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Well, I just tried 10.5.1 DVD Player (http://sweh.livejournal.com/234652.html) and it looks better... except the playback stutters a lot and the OS crashed! (http://sweh.livejournal.com/234864.html).

I might have to go back to 10.4.11 :-(

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I am not yet recommending 10.5 to people who don't have some specific need for it. It's the FreeBSD 5 of Mac OS X. FreeBSD 5 had lots of ambitious infrastructural work, and it all hit the tree relatively late, which didn't leave enough time for stabilization before release. I suspect some of the same dynamics were at work in the development of Mac OS X 10.5.

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xlerb.livejournal.com

AFP. AFS is something rather different.

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Duh, right. I have AFS on the brain, it seems.

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xlerb.livejournal.com

Dunno about automounter. It might be interesting to try to track down the problem. Maybe lock jdev in a room with your computer and a bottle of Mountain Dew ... ?

volfs/Carbon zaniness, maybe? Like, maybe it doesn't activate the mount point if the inode gets magic-chicken-summoned by the FSSpec emulation instead of being namei'ed normally?

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Oh, and if you figure out what the deal is with rc.local, let me know. In the mean time, Mac OS X's crontab(5) does support "@reboot", according to the man page.

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Cron and crontab haven't been the right way to launch processes since 10.4.0 - launchd is the thing to use.

As long as people persist in treating Mac OS X as BSD or Linux and then getting annoyed when it isn't exactly the same, they're going to complain.

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syringavulgaris.livejournal.com

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I'm not complaining. Cron is there, and it works. I mentioned upthread that Mac OS X is UNIX<tm>, and I meant it. One of the cool things about UNIX and its clones is that one does not need to use completely different methods with every variant.

I have dabbled with launchd, but found it difficult to work with. I admire its versatility, but it is perhaps a bit heavyweight for simple things like this.

But, since you are offering solutions — how would you launch a job on reboot with launchd? How would you get a list of such configured jobs?

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Preamble: Peter Borg has written Lingon, a wonderful tool for managing Launchd property lists [1], over at

http://lingon.sourceforge.net/

And I'd use that to launch my process by setting "Run it when it is loaded by the system (at startup or login)".

Lingon will also show you all user and system agents and daemons managed by launchd.

The command line alternative is launchctl - a one-line or interactive interface to launchd.

MacBookPro:~ spride$ launchctl list
PID	Status	Label
460	-	0x10d770.launchctl
450	-	0x10d670.bash
449	-	0x10c300.login
448	-	[0x0-0x35035].com.apple.Terminal
…

between launchctl and Lingon I think that'd stand you in good stead.

[1] launchd uses simply-formed XML files as its control files, which normally live in:

~/Library/LaunchAgents         Per-user agents provided by the user.
/Library/LaunchAgents          Per-user agents provided by the administrator.
/Library/LaunchDaemons         System wide daemons provided by the administrator.
/System/Library/LaunchAgents   Mac OS X Per-user agents.
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons  Mac OS X System wide daemons.

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Call me crusty, but I *do* find that a bit heavyweight. I don't think I should need any tool besides vi to set up a job to run at startup. Mac OS X does supply cron and I won't apologize for using it.

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Well, it's intended as a superset of process initiation tools such as init, rc, the init.d and rc.d scripts, SystemStarter (Mac OS X), inetd and xinetd, atd, crond and watchdogd, so it has to be more flexible, and I guess that results in a little more complexity. I don't think it's unreasonably complex given what it does. But whatever works, works. :-)

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It, like SOlaris 10 svcs (a SQL based config) allows a much more flexible configuration with dependencies, service recovery, auto-restart and monitoring... all good stuff.

I don't object to the new way of doing things, but I do object to them leaving hooks for the old way which don't work (there is an /etc/rc and it does reference /etc/rc.local, so why doesn't the script run?). Heh, I notice that hook has disappeared in 10.5.1. Heheheh

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I can find out, if you like? We have Apple Lackeys at our beck, and even call on occasion.

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Given the hook disappearing, it was probably left over cruft that hadn't been properly cleaned up in the migration to launchd and so a red herring. If I cared enough then I could work it out for myself (strategic echo statements spread throughout the boot scripts are wonderful debugging tools :-)). But it's not a big issue. I just have a sudo script called from my login profile, and my account is set to auto login so I have an effective work-around.

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Don't play with Solaris 10 then. The boot process of that is managed by SQL configuration files, the contents which are initialised from XML templates and then managed by command line options. Even inetd.conf doesn't actually do anything, anymore.

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Noted. :-(

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10.5.1 doesn't seem to have the rc.local hook any more (at least "grep -r rc.local /etc" doesn't find anything) so maybe it was just uncleaned crufy in 10.4.10

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On the whole multimedia thing: is there an issue with Front Row, which was designed especially for media center deployments?

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Front row is a front-end onto DVD Player, Quicktime, iTunes and so on (when you select music in Front row then it actually builds a playlist in iTunes and plays that). So the iTunes automount issue affects Front Row. Similar the DVD Player artifacts are also present in Front Row. Worse, Front Row doesn't (maybe changed in 10.5; not tested) handle ripped DVDs. There's a "DVD Assist" hack which works around it, but it's a real kludge. Front Row also has scalability limits; it's painful to scroll through 450 CDs or 200 DVDs to find what you want.

(I do use Front Row for downloaded avi files, eg UK programs not yet released in the US such as Doctor Who and Spooks).

In addition, for music playing I like a command line interface so I can ssh into the Mac from my couch-side machine and play music without needing the main 42" TV turned on (although the visualizer is pretty...)

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I just meant for the user interface (your original point 1).

By "ripped DVDs" you mean what exactly - a collection of VOB files in a folder, DVD-Rs burned from a copy of a DVD, or something else? If I had ripped DVDs (which of course I don't, Mr. MPAA) I would actually rip the decrypted VOB files to H.264 MP4 files using Handbrake (http://handbrake.fr/) rather than keeping the VOB files lying around making the place look untidy. But as that would be illegal, of course I don't. But these would then show up in Front Row's Movies category very nicely.

You can control iTunes from the command line (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20011108211802830) - check out the 'osascript' command that sends Apple Events to aware apps (basically any Cocoa app). Where are you actually playing the music? What we do is have our iTunes running permanently on the Mac Mini media center. If we want loud music we play it back via the big TV and subwoofer, and if we want private music, we start up iTunes on our local machines and connect to the iTunes library over Bonjour sharing; that way the Mini's library appears as if it were local and outputs to the local client's audio hardware. This is a very much better solution than mounting remote file systems and feeding them to local iTunes clients, and is how iTunes is meant to work with networks.

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By rip, I do mean exactly keeping the VIDEO_TS folder containing the VOBs from the DVD. For the main feature only (no extras, no menus etc). I didn't want to convert to mp4 format because the aim of the game here is to keep things at as good a quality as possible (hence the earlier moan about iTunes not supporting FLAC). I have 4*500gb disks in a RAID5 array, so I have approx 1.5Tbytes of usable space. I've got my movies ripped, but that's only 15% of my DVD collection. I need bigger disks!

And if the MPAA want to come and deal with me then they'll be on the losing side. I have paid for all the movies I'm talking about. I have them on the shelf in the next room, nicely ordered. The only reason I want them on a hard disk is for ease of use. I'm lazy :-)

As for controlling stuff from the command line... http://sweh.spuddy.org/rubbish/mac are my current scripts to control iTunes and DVD Player. The main "itunes" command was based on that article, but I've enhanced it a fair bit since then!

I don't any other Macs other than the mini under the TV. But I do have many other Unix machines (Linux, Solaris primarily. Occasionally a BSD install, or something else random for test purposes). No iTunes, other than on that machine. I'm an old-school Unix-type :-)

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lillilah

I didn't have all that much trouble with my PC, but when OS X came out all my excuses for not switching over to Mac went away. Yes, they are more expensive, don't come by default with the Windows version of spider solitaire, and fewer games run on them. However, you have clearly found a solution for the last two points. The first point is something one can cope with if you accept that you are paying to deal with less bullshit. I really like dealing with less bullshit.

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