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Viewing posts tagged mac

There are more Unixes than Ubuntu

No rant about MacOS today, but a rant about software authors who apparently know nothing else than their favourite Linux distribution. I'm trying to get Mapnik to work. They claim that it now works on MacOS. On 10.5, perhaps. On 10.4 you'll need a newer Python version. Not at least 2.4, but exactly 2.4. However, both Boost and Mapnik link against the system python version 2.3 and install in the directories of version 2.4.

MacOS X is so much better than, say, Linux, right?

Apparently their scheduler isn't. I had an I/O and CPU intensive job running over night on the PowerBook. The system did not run out of memory. But it swapped out sshd, which resulted in the active SSH clients to time out with server does not respond. Which subsequently killed the running job. After six hours.

Making MacOS X usable

Luckily, MacOS X is based on some kind of BSD, in other words: it is a Unix system. It even comes with X11. However, as a desktop system many tools I like and need aren't present. I already had an ancient version of Darwinports running since 10.2. That old installation was terribly broken, though, and almost nothing compiled anymore on 10.4. Thus, I removed it and started again. There are several alternatives available, two of them being based on (Free)BSD ports, and one on Debian packaging.