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Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

lapwinglabs.com

221–230 of 267 posts

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because /usr/local doesn't belong to homebrew and is not appropriate for homebrew to commandeer. MacPorts was originally written by the BSD team at Apple; if /usr/local was where a packaging system was supposed to stuff itself on OS X, they would have used it -- instead of /opt/local. The co-opting of /use/local breaks all kinds of stuff -- for instance, /usr/local/lib is in the default linker search path and can't b…

I disagree. / is where the stuff needed for single-user mode gets installed. /usr is where the OS's userland stuff gets installed. On Linux systems this includes everything that you get from your package manager, because this is considered to be part of your system. /usr/local is wher you install your own packages. For example, if I'm installing something from source, that's where I'm going to install it. Or if I'm b…

> /usr/local is wher you install your own packages. For example, if I'm installing something from source, that's where I'm going to install it.

Right, that's what it's for, it's also why a 3rd party package manager shouldn't use it.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#222

This "cool hacker settings for your Mac" script turns off your laptop's power saving features (sleep, display dimming, hibernation even though sleep was off(?)), removes at least three kinds of backups for data loss (MobileTimeMachine, Resume, hibernation file), and changes AppKit settings in a way your customers will never be using (by turning off Automatic Termination, which is pretty harmless). Please don't run sc…

Just like PC's, Macs have entered the world of, what I call, "car guys." Car guys are always fiddling with things for a tiny performance or perceived security boosts without really thinking things through. In the Windows world you'll hear them tell you how you must disable the UAC, must install registry 'cleaners', must use $av_vendor_x because $av_vendor_y sucks, fiddle with some obscure registry change, use drivers…

I think one of the things that the author forgot to mention is that you don't have to install these as `sudo` basically, homebrew does that already but with other things there no really need for it. As of the FOSS/Linux stuff you are seeing, these aren't random files, these are mac apps see: https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you 100%. I bought a new mac book pro 2 weeks ago and it took me about 2 hours to get up and running. Because OS X is linux based (BSD but the difference is not relevant here), a lot already exists to make these kind of things work out of the box. Personally, I need two things to have my setup working: - Homebrew (OS X only but it's a given to anyone used to ruby) - dotfiles My dotfiles are on github and…

I always got the feeling that installing Homebrew and running the associated apps that run under X but not natively under Quartz was a broken way to get apps on Mac OSX (unless it runs under Quartz now...?) It feels like the "dirtying" of the native system in the same way that installing cygwin and a mingw and GNUWin32 on Windows does, just in order to get it more like Windows. Rather, I'd use the native utilities on…

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Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like PC's, Macs have entered the world of, what I call, "car guys." Car guys are always fiddling with things for a tiny performance or perceived security boosts without really thinking things through. In the Windows world you'll hear them tell you how you must disable the UAC, must install registry 'cleaners', must use $av_vendor_x because $av_vendor_y sucks, fiddle with some obscure registry change, use drivers…

Anyone who was ever 1k short of EMS to get TIE Fighter booting became a 'car guy' :)

Took me a moment to realize what you were talking about then visions of my game boot disks came flooding back. They're probably still in my parents' computer desk.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#225
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. / is where the stuff needed for single-user mode gets installed. /usr is where the OS's userland stuff gets installed. On Linux systems this includes everything that you get from your package manager, because this is considered to be part of your system. /usr/local is wher you install your own packages. For example, if I'm installing something from source, that's where I'm going to install it. Or if I'm b…

> /usr/local is wher you install your own packages. For example, if I'm installing something from source, that's where I'm going to install it. Right, that's what it's for, it's also why a 3rd party package manager shouldn't use it.

Homebrew is installing stuff from source, though. It's automating the task of me doing it.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#226
post #142

One of the most valuable skills someone can have, in my opinion, is not getting attached to really specific workflows or settings or tools. Instead I value being flexible and being able to adapt to whatever system I'm using. In practice, this means that whenever I think about making some change to my software environment, my first impulse is to ask myself, "do I really have to change this?" This is a 180 from my old,…

I am exactly the opposite and it certainly has nothing to do with fun or self-image. I can hop on to any Linux box and be just fine. But I'm comfortable in a familiar setting with my `~/bin`, aliases, editor (vim), keybindings, a few key-remappings and package manager (pacman). There's a lot of benefits that come from having precisely the same environment on my web server, home machine, laptop, media PCs and my machi…

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Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#229
post #42

I do not wants to flame, but is there a reason people dislike Macports so much. I tried Homebrew when it was 1-2 years old, but stuck with ports bc it was so stable, compiles from source, and I never heard a serious problem. I heard the opposite complaint on the net, but almost all Macports hate was from many years before. I am the only one who chose not to rely on Homebrew!?

I like Macports a lot more. I've never had an issue with any of the packages really besides a few esoteric ones that failed to build or hadn't been updated in a while (and they are usually easy to by updating the portfile). I prefer the segregated environment of macports too, you won't overwrite any system stuff. I got the impression that homebrew wasn't a terribly well thought out tool and was a bit lazy. There's a lot of 'github' culture there which I'm wary of (and by github culture I mean half finished stuff and fancy looking projects lacking rigor). Case in point, it annoys me that their slogan is 'the missing package manager for OSX'. Macports had been around long before they were. I only sometimes wish that Macports had better binary package support.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#230

I've been a long time Mac user and I think that software setup and updates has always been a bit clunky. Apple tries to make it easy with Software Update. You can always Homebrew to get missing pieces. For me, I use CentOS for servers and I really wish that OS X had 'yum' ( https://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/yum/ ) It feels very easy for me to install, update, remove, etc

This is very true, and I too happily go to Linux land for servers. But for the typical target market of Apple devices (this is debatable), most people are happier with the download / open DMG / drag to applications scenario instead of typing, no?

yes, I agree that most people are happy with the DMG process.

I wonder if I could port yum to OS X. I'd have to look into how they structure the repo and how I would host it. What about just analyzing for what updates the system needs and pulling them from their respective websites, etc.

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