So, why the Mac? Yesterday, my son ( 5 years old and still kicking - literally ) started kindergarten. I, admittedly, use it to run PuTTY, Cygwin, ActiveState Perl and many other useful programs and find it to be an excellent repository for all my log files and script backups. Can you imagine getting paid to barely be able to do anything? ) No offense to Windows fans out there. If someone threw me enough dough, I'd still do it. I secretly wanted to be one when I started out in this business. The marrying of the fancy windows interface with the bare bones power of Linux should make it easier for the next generation of computer-savvy users to not only enjoy the pretty pictures ( and the funny sounds they make when you click on them with a pointing device), but also (by necessity) possess a rudimentary knowledge of the more powerful underpinnings of all that Window dressing.Įither that or they'll be highly proficient in Fake-DOS v49.x and, if something goes horribly horribly wrong, all the jobs in the tech sector will be for BAT file programmers. I'm happy, also, that Mac has a Linuxy ( Is that a word? judges? ) command line interface. Mac has been fronting their BSD'ish CLI for quite a while now and, if you can use RedHat, Suse, FreeBSD or any of the other myriad varieties of Linux on the market today, OS X's insides should be easy enough for you to figure out.
We're actually going to be looking at their underlying Linux subsystem, which is where we come full circle and it all makes sense. Hopefully the " Mac" in the title didn't put anyone off (Like, say " Vista," might ). But, in keeping with this blog's tradition (and mission) of exploring all things Linux and Unix, it's not too far of a stretch. Today's post, as the title suggests, is veering slightly off the beaten path of this blog's general content.