best setup for unix beginner
 

hi,

i am fairly new to unix and decided to dedicate a external firewire drive for learning. i bought some books on sendmail and unix basics.

my stupid question is: what is the best way to set up my firewire drive? i was just going to install 10.2.6 and dev tools, but should i set it up another way?

thanks for your time...

I recomend the O'reilly books. I use them to learn and they are great for reference. I guess you could set up the external drive as a UFS system (unix file system) and set it to run the terminal instead of the GUI. There was a hint on this website from last week I think that explained how to set up your mac that way. That way you would have to learn your way around from the console side of unix rather than using the GUI. You can always launch the graphical user interface from the terminal once you log in.

I am just curious has anyone tried using a different GUI with darwin? Like KDE or xwindows, or something of the like? Can it even be done?

Just start reading through your books and set it up how you want. If its for learning you can always wipe/reinstall. I know my first time with Linux I reloaded my system about 3 or 4 times before I got the config down how I wanted it with out screwing things up.

thanks... thats what i was looking for, i don't want the gui.

i just received my o'reilly sendmail book and learning unix for mac os x. i wanted to install linux yellow dog, but after reading these forums it didn't make sense to.

i can't seem to find that hint?

thanks for your help, again!

I fond the hint, should have posted it to begin with, but its monday so I am lazy.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...command+prompt

Hope that helps

Wow, man. I hope you didn't pay a lot for your Mac.

No offense, honestly, but if you didn't want Aqua and the stuff atop Darwin, you shoulda just bought a cheap Linux or *BSD box.

hmmm...maybe it might make some sense if you read the first post.

this is not meant to be a substitution for the gui, but a disk to help me get around in the world of unix.

i'm just starting out!

Oh, ****. I mixed up your post, tlarkin's GUI replacement comment, and another forum thread I had in another tab.

MOU foot TH

First , try to install X11 on your external FW drive. I suggest to follow fink portings.

Next, try updating the fink packages using apt-get command and try using install options too.

Try installing Midnight Commander(mc) and read the help manual. You will never live without it for X11 plarform, I can gurantee. With mc, You need not learn cryptic Unix commands any more.

I have successfully installed KDE 3.1 on X11 and have been using the desktop intensily, ranging from programming text editor, Kate, to IDE KDevelop. It can co-exisit with Mac OS X.

Have fun with X11!!!!

Sendmail...?
 

If you have a specific reason to use sendmail, have fun.
However if you just want some Mail Transfer Agent, I highly recommend checking other options, such as postfix. While sendmail is perhaps the best known MTA, it seems by far the most complicated to configure. Myself - not being a total newcommer - passed on it.

Alex

maybe i should've asked a different question! i am looking for help and/or advice on diving into unix. any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!!

what is x11?

i have read a lot about sendmail on the web and have tried to set it up with no success, thats why i purchased the book.
i guess i will have to find out for myself... the only tutorial i could find on installing and configuring postfix was out-dated (i think for 10.1) if this is easier to set up, can you point me in the right direction? can i configure postfix to be used with mail or in my case mailsmith?

i am curious how you guys got into it. i would like to take some classes too, if anyone could suggest any.

A good start!
 

One of the *very helpful* moderator's here has a website, it's a great place to start.

Some great articles from the O'Reilly camp are listed here, check them out.

Jacques

thanks jacques for the helpful links

As you dig in, start new threads here with questions!

---

Using UNIX is sort of like looking at this, it can get you dizzy if you don't keep moving!

weird...you know i saw that image last friday and made the mistake of showing it off as my desktop pattern, big mistake after a hangover!!!

i will definetly come here with my questions and i am sure you all will get sick of me!

thanks again

HFS+ or UFS
 

after reading tlarkins post on setting up this drive just for learning my way around unix, i decided to look around about info on ufs. it seems that not too many people recommend it.

which should i use?

UFS will not kill your system, but I really recommend against it!
For example, UFS will not allow you to run classic apps (if you care), and the volume name will always be "/", at least after each reboot. (The concept of a volume name is unknown to UFS).
If you need UFS for testing purposes, use DiskCopy to create an UFS image and mount it, that's what I do.
Why do people want UFS? To test apps which are supposed to run on servers which have a case-sensitive file system; HFS+ is case-preserving, but not case-sensitive.
Hope this helps

Alex

Yeah good point. In unix folders, commands, etc are case sensitive, as well in linux. If you ever switch over to pure unix you will have the bad habit of not being case sensitive, which honestly doesn't sound like that bad of a habbit to break.

Do you plan on learning any kind of scripting like java, perl, php, apple script, etc etc?

For the most part I would say you could get away with just using HFS+. I just threw that in there so you would look at it I guess.

hfs+ it is!
 

yeah, ufs sounds too scary for me! thanks below.

tlarkin, my focus would be on java, php, perl, apache, etc...

at least that's what i'm interested in learning about. i would love to take some courses, if anyone in the new york city area knows of any, let me know.

thanks all

Check out your local community college. I know the one where I live offers like 10 unix courses. From the begining novice to the advanced administrator, and even solaris courses. Compared to tech schools and universities its way cheaper. I doubt the material taught in a tech school vs a community college is that much different. I for one know many tech school graduates who were disappointed when they found out they could have learned the same thing at a community college for fractions of the cost.

tutorials
 

For learning Java, I think you can hardly beat Sun's online Java Tutorial:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/

For PHP, the online manual has a very short tutorial and has the advantage of user-contributed comments at the bottom of each page:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/

For Perl, the online tutorial mentioned at the Learning Perl web site (http://learn.perl.org/) is a start, but probably best to buy a book. I would advise learning some Perl before going on to PHP (which shares much of its syntax) but maybe that's just because that is the order in which I learned things. Perl is much more useful in a general UNIX context while PHP is usually only used in the context of web pages.

For Apache & PHP, the series of articles at MacDev are quite good:
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/ma...aguar_pt1.html

But back to your original question about how to set up your firewire disk, I would partition it (with Disk Utility) to have two partitions: one the same size as your Mac's internal hard drive, the other with all the rest of the space. Make both partitions HFS+
Then use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your current (internal) hard-drive onto the partition that is the appropriate size. Then you can boot your Mac from that partition and fool around as much as you want with no worries about ruining your system, but you will still have all the apps etc that you are used to. But the sorts of things (programming) that you intend to do will not be able to harm your system anyway. The only risk to your system (software) would be if you wanted to start to fool around with system software modifications, etc. Or if you experimented with dangerous commands as root in Terminal (e.g. rm -rf / )

thanks for the links... i really appreciate your help.

i have a 120 gb lacie firewire drive that i am going to use as my experimental/learning disk. i just don't understand why i would need to partition it the same size as my system disk. i mean, my startup drive now is about 14 gb and if i partition it for that size, then is it possible to install fink on the other empty partition? i am just thinking i would run out of space once i start installing unix programs with fink.

i might just partition it in two equal sizes, is this a good idea? i guess if i need more space i could use ccc to move it to another disk and re-partition it. so maybe this is a stupid question... lol.

thanks for your time.

cloning
 

I suggested making one of the partitions the same size as your internal disk so that you could use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your internal disk onto that partition. If you clone onto a bigger partition, you are will have unused space on that partition. You could add new files that would make use of that extra space but part of the ide of making a clone of your internal disk is that the clone would also serve as a backup of your internal disk in case the internal one failed. I.e. I am imagining a scenario where you start by cloning your internal disk onto a partition on the firewire disk. Then you play around a bit using that partition. Then (a few days or weeks later) you decide to make a fresh backup of your internal disk and so you erase the partition and do the clone again. Etc.

You could use the other partition for things you want to keep, longer-term projects etc.