Sorry it's taken me so long to get around to writing this column. The past few months have been hectic for me. First there's the arrival of my new book, the Mac OS X Web Server Handbook, onto store shelves, and the work to get a Web site together. Then there's my day job, and various other activities associated with my ongoing efforts to have a personal life. And so you've seen loads of articles, updates, and other tips and tricks associated with the long-awaited arrival of Mac OS X.
What more could I possibly add? That's what I've been asking myself. Well, there's quite a few things, actually, especially regarding how things panned out from when the book was sent off to print until now. So I thought I'd attempt a quick recap.
First, Mac OS X 10.0 is now up to version 10.0.4, and if you're using Mac OS X, you should be sure to update your software using the Software Update panel of the System Preferences. Now that OS X has brought Unix to your desktop, you'll want to keep up-to-date and apprised of any security issues.
The other major difference between the final and public beta releases of Mac OS X was that Apple had seriously locked down the Unix aspects of the system from the prying eyes of novices. If you don't know Unix, Apple made it relatively difficult for you to do major damage even from the command line. This also made it slightly more difficult, though not impossible, for those of you with Unix experience to access the soft underbelly of OS X. However, all in all, I have to say that I was quite impressed at Apple's succesful balancing of access to (through the Aqua Finder) and protection of the Darwin kernel.
Apple also provided a strong base of Web serving capabilities with the basic OS X installation. Apache is combined with a full suite of modules, including WebDAV, and the scripting capabilities of PHP, Tcl, and Perl. Without downloading another piece of software, you can do some powerful Web serving. And there are plenty of additional freeware Unix packages out there for the asking. Even if only the Unix source code is provided, you can compile and install a lot of powerful software on Mac OS X. You may have to run it from the command line, but that's an option that wasn't available before.
However, another bit of information I learned just before the book went to print was that the initial installation of PHP included with OS X was broken. To get PHP to work required me to install a correctly compiled version that I found on the Web. I'd be interested in hearing whether any of Apple's updates to OS X also fixed this problem.
On a slightly tangential topic, I'd like to emphasize how well the Classic environment works. Even under the public beta and moreso under the final release, the Classic environment lets you run Mac OS 9 applications within OS X. I'm writing this column in Adobe GoLive running in the Classic environment of OS X. Now an application in the Classic environment doesn't get the benefit of OS X's preemptive multi-tasking or memory management, but it's a technological marvel that it works at all. I can use GoLive -- no slouch at consuming system resources -- and even connect by FTP through GoLive to a remote site. The applications of Microsoft Office also work at least as well as they do under Mac OS 9, and you can print or access Internet resources without difficulty.
I'll wrap up my ramblings today with a few cute Darwin tricks that will make your life easier.
First, you may have discovered that, unlike the public beta, the final release of Mac OS X doesn't let you easily gain root access. The reason is that, in the default installation, the root account is not enabled. You have two options for getting root access.
The first is the "sudo" command. Type "man sudo" at the Terminal command line for all the details of sudoing commands at the Unix prompt. In short, though, if you preface a Unix command with "sudo," you run that command as the root user. For example, typing "sudo chown bob file.html" will make user bob the owner of file.html. (The first time you sudo a command, you need to enter your administrator account password. Subsequent sudo's don't require the password.)
The second option is to enable the root account. You need the NetInfo Manager utility that Apple has tucked away in the /Applications/Utilities folder. I'll leave the actual enabling steps as an exercise to the reader -- but I will tell you that the necessary options are under the Security option of the Domain menu.
A second trick I've found is how to start a graphical Aqua application from the Terminal command line. The trick is the "open" command. Technically, the open command opens a file, but you can tell it what application to open it in. So, for example, if you want to open the file named "file.html" in the TextEdit application, you can enter "open -a TextEdit.app file.html" from the command line. Note the need to write "TextEdit.app" since that's how an OS X application appears from the Unix side of things. (Do a "ls /Applications" if you want to explore this in more detail.)
Anyway, I'll continue to work on this site to make it easier to use and try to keep the columns coming. But only if you buy the book!