Jason Sidabras

So I’ve been in Mac country for over 2 years and this weekend was my first reinstall since I bought my PowerBook G4. The whole system seemed sluggish and checking out a disk defrag program it seemed like my system needed a complete reformat. I also took the time to upgrade to Leopard which has a few integrated features (VNC and a VNC viewer, Xorg X11) that I thought was worth it.

When I purchased my computer I was 3 days away from a Marquette presentation and I didn’t have time to tweak the system as I seen fit. This time I finished my presentation early and decided to reformat the day before. heh. Brilliant!

Since a few of my other friends have ventured into Mac country I figured I would set up a list of what I did to make OSx more tolerable. Its not a bad OS, its just not 100% unixy.

I never use spotlight. If I need to find a file I use the find, grep or locate. So when I found out that mds (8) was taking 100% CPU for the first 4 hours after my clean installation I was mildly annoyed. Reading the man page on mdutil(1) I found a simple command to fix this problem:

$ sudo mdutil -i off

No more indexing. Now to get rid of spotlights 10% CPU usage.

$ sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/ /Applications/

Now spotlight doesn’t turn on unless I tell it to turn on, and I can Apple-Q the sucker away. In the CoreServices folder you can find a few other things that you can remove from startup. I also did the same thing with Finder, which allows me to remove finder (which removes Icons from the desktop) also I tried to do this with Dock, but I lost the background image, which sucks.

Technically if I run startx with a window-manager I would be be able to overlay a new desktop image, maybe something I would be willing to do with fvwm.

The next nifty tool that was recommended to me by Aaron was Qucksilver. My number one complaint using OSx was simple: clicking around for Applications sucked. It was cool that they were all in one place, but it really was a pain to click through 4 folder sets just to get to Disk Utility.

I would like to give mad props to the Blacktree developers. I’ve never came across a more perfect application and visually appealing.

In addition to Quicksilver they have a SIMBL plugin that puts a Quake-like command line terminal which can be opened by a hotkey. Visor plugin is quite awesome. Instead of screwing around with random terminals, I can just engage the visor command-line run the command and shade it back up.

Since OSx is built off of FreeBSD (Darwin), under the GUI is a full POSTIX compliant UNIX. So what is needed is to take advantage of all of the opensource software out there. It used to be DarwinPorts and Fink. To me DarwinPorts was very sketchy and Fink did weird things. Well it seems that others thought the same because DarwinPorts was forked and killed into MacPorts which is smooth as ice. Simple commands install packages with all dependencies just like a good *BSD should act.

The final thing that I have added to the system (so far) is SCplugin which is a great Finder plugin for SVN, which all of my bills and Masters Thesis work use SVN to keep track of changes.

ONE MORE THING: I found that if  you use finder and would like to bookmark a folder in the left hand side you go to the folder of interest and click Apple-T. This adds the folder to your menubar (as shown in picture above for MastersThesis).

I can’t really think of anything else that is currently needed. Write some recommendations!

I plan on adding more to this if I think of something.

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