On September 13th, 2000 Apple computer released the public beta of MacOS X
(pronounced 'ten'). Being the computer jock that I am, I had my order
placed on Sep 13th. Granted, I've had MacOS X Server on a CD for nearly
a year but never bothered playing with it. I can't remember why but it
won't install on my Blue & White G3. I knew it had some show stopping
problems, like not being able to run my "Classic" apps. So,
anyway, I ordered my OS X PB cd and waited.
When OS X did finally arrive, Apple was so clever as to require an adult signature. Grrr, I had the package shipped to my house so it took me a couple extra days to actually get it into my hands (left the UPS guy a note to reroute to my office). This happened to be a very good time for OS X to come in because just last week I upgraded my internal hard drive to an IBM GXP75 30GB drive. I did so mainly because I had read some great reviews and purchased one at work for some performance testing I was doing and it stomped all over everything except the 15k RPM LVD Cheetah. Anyway, that's another story but I bought two of them for myself, one for my FreeBSD server and one for my G3. It makes an enormous performance difference, unbelievable how much faster my Mac boots up.
So, I already had a fresh backup since I had duplicated the contents of my factory 6GB internal drive to my additional 10GB internal drive (yeah yeah, I know you're not supposed to be able to do that with the first generation G3's but I made it work anyway). So, I had my data on the factory 6GB, the new 30GB, and the spare internal 10GB. Yee hah, power the mac down and yank out my spiffy 30GB drive and put the factory 6GB in there. Power it back up and pop in the OS X cd. She booted right up into the installer. I must have been using HFS on that factory drive because it forced me to reformat it (which didn't bother me much). I chose UFS because I'm VERY familiar with Unix systems and I know it's a better file system than HFS+.
Some thirty minutes later I was rebooting into MacOS X. Initially I was really lost, it wasn't very MacOS like or very X windows like either. It was sort of some weird mix of the two but it didn't matter, I was here to test the beast and test it I would. I went down the list of apps, opening each one and getting a feel for what each one did. Hey, it's still pretty sparse but there's some really cool stuff laying around. I have a full MacOS 9 install on the second hard drive and OS X thinks it can boot that sucker up so I give it a double click. Weird, it starts booting up but then disappears. Then I tried running a MacOS 9 app which in turn tries running the classic environment but the sucker crashes again. Ah well, hasn't hurt my OS X box so I keep playing.
Then I find what I was after, my old friend terminal! Apple did a very nice job with their terminal application. It does everything I expected from a good term program, has a huge scrollback buffer, and lots of keyboard shortcuts so I can keep my hands on the keyboard. Thank you Apple. Lets see if I can SSH over to my FreeBSD machine. I was very pleased to find OS X has OpenSSH build in. Excellent! OK, important stuff, lets see if can mount my NFS partition with all my mp3's from my FreeBSD box to the my MacOS machine: "mount gw:/usr/home/matt/mp3 ~matt/Documents/mp3" and no complaints. My heart smiled. A quick "df" revealed that, sure enough, I had all my mp3's grafted onto my local file system. Apple's built in mp3 player works just fine. It's a bit spartan and I'd rather see something full featured like Audion for the mac or XMMS for Unix but this one will do for now.
Hmm, what else.. I'd like to get my html files from my FreeBSD server over here to my Mac. I wonder if rsync is installed...sure enough! Wow, thanks a bunch to someone. It's 4:00am, time to go to bed.
Day 2: Since I couldn't get the Classic stuff to work, I decided to formulate another plan of attack. Since nothing terribly bad happened on my system, I decided to chance it and install MacOS X on top of MacOS 9 on my internal IBM 30GB drive. I did have the backup on the 10GB drive just in case so I didn't have much to lose except some time. So, I unplugged my 10GB drive (so OS X couldn't touch my sacred data), removed the 6GB, and stuck the 30GB back in and booted off the install CD. Since my new drive was formatted with HFS+ it was perfectly happy to install right over the top of my OS 9 installation. The install only took 12 minutes or so, much faster than with the factory drive. Wow, I absolutely LOVE this new IBM drive. BTW, this new 30GB drive is also one of the quietest, coolest running drives I've ever used.
After installing I rebooted and once again had a nice clean OS X to start with. The installer moved all my OS 9 stuff into a "Mac OS 9" directory which I'm sure is a good idea. Hey, lets fire up the Classic environment and what do you know, it works! Sweet, let's try a few MacOS apps and see what works: MYOB, Dreamweaver.....screech! We can't save files back to my web site directory. It wasn't hard to resolve, I suspected that I didn't have write permissions and a visit to my friend terminal revealed that to be the case. So, I changed the ownership of the files (chown & chmod) and moved them (mv -r) into my ~matt/Documents directory. Voila, the problem was solved.
Big Bummer #1
It appears that all existing MacOS files become owned by root and it's up to the system admin to change them as necessary. This seems perfectly reasonable to me except that I think that many MacOS only users will struggle with this since I didn't find a way to do so without using unix utilities. The other minor thing was that I had to delete the prefs for Street Atlas since I have it installed on my hard drive so I don't have to pop in the stupid CD every time I want to use it. Since the MacOS X installer moved all the OS 9 files that the program looks for, deleting the prefs was necessary for it to find the data files again. I imagine other classic apps will struggle with this too.
Onward we go testing important MacOS apps: Photoshop, BBEdit, Palm Desktop, Street Atlas USA. Great, everything I use often works. It's important to note that I no longer need a lot of my mainstay MacOS apps since I've got their Unix counterparts like SSH, telnet, ftp, mail, and a web browser. However, I've had some problems with IE for MacOS X and there's also issues with OmniWeb so there really isn't a great web browser out for MacOS X yet. I'd like to see something like KDE's browser find it's way over but until then I've got another solution.
Darned Cool Feature #1
MacX 2.0.4 (which is a very old app) works just great in the classic environment. What's that mean? It means that I can still run ALL my X windows applications (like Netscape) that are installed on my FreeBSD server under MacOS X. A native X server like MacX for MacOS OS X would be just peachy but MacX seems to be very stable and works fine. Because it has a very primitive window manager it's somewhat limited but Netscape and all my favorite gnome and KDE apps work just fine.
Big Bummer #2
OK, so lets see if I can actually scan something. The instant I turn on my scanner MacOS X pops up a dialog box complaining that a firewire device stopped responding. Hmmm, I only have one FireWire device plugged in (an external WD 30GB drive) but it's not powered up. I have an Adaptec 2930U SCSI adapter and attached to it is my Zip drive and my venerable Umax Vista S6E scanner that I'm known and loved for years. It's a great scanner and I lament that Umax discontinued them but I got one and I'm not letting it go. Oops, that's another article. Anyway, I figured out that the device that OS X was complaining about not a FireWire device but my zip drive. I can't figure out why because my SCSI bus is set up correctly.
So, I rebooted with both the SCSI devices powered on and no complaints, it does recognize the zip drive but Photoshop under the classic environment can't see my scanner. :-( In conclusion, I need to reboot into MacOS in order to scan anything. It could be worse.
Big Bummer #3
Apple's classic DVD player doesn't work in the Classic environment and there isn't yet a DVD player for OS X. :-( I also couldn't get Timbuktu to work under OS X. I'm sure it's possible if one were to putter around with it a bit but I had work to do so I just rebooted into OS 9. The software update feature is there but seems very broken. It tries very hard to connect (via my DSL line) but the servers are always "busy." That's got to be a crock, I've ran the update as all hours of the day and night and it's never once actually succeeded in updating anything.
Big Bummer #4
Occasionally an app will hang (IE is really good about it) in such a way that telling it to die (either via Cmd-Cntrl-Esc menu or "kill -9 <pid>" won't kill it. Selecting restart from the menu fails as well because the system can't terminate the process. Fortunately, you can pull up a terminal and "reboot" takes care of it. The serial support also seems to be lacking. I haven't toyed much but in the 10 minutes I spent, I didn't get Palm Desktop talking to my Palm IIIx.
Conclusions:
In conclusion, the system has a lot of potential. It's got some of the the best features of my two favorite operating systems on the same box. I hope that Apple will keep the system open too. Having networking utilities like OpenSSH, rsync, NFS, and such make using a Macintosh a lot less cumbersome. It's also really nice to open a ssh connection from work into my Mac and grab files or just look up stuff.
About the reviewer:
Now, my computing perspective is a little different than most so there are some things for you to keep in mind while reading this: I grew up in a Macintosh world working in the publishing industry. I've been using Macintosh Computers since I convinced my dad to buy us a state of the art Mac Plus for his print shop way back when. I know a LOT about the Mac OS and have dabbled in scripting the MacOS using AppleScript and Hypercard but for the most part, I just use it. I have also worked a lot in the other worlds, doing a lot of programming on the DOS and then windows platforms for a time and then venturing into the world of Unix.
I cut my UNIX teeth on SGI running IRIX and SunOS on Sparc hardware before starting my own ISP. From there I graduated from running a MacOS based ISP to A/UX (Apples first UNIX) before it couldn't keep up and I went to Intel hardware running BSDI. For the next few years we ran all the administration on MacOS and a custom FileMaker Pro database integrated with our BSDI systems and all the serving happening on the BSDI machines. Off and on over the years I've toyed with MkLinux, RedHat, Debian, FreeBSD, NetBSD, MachTen, BeOS, and a few others. I'm very comfortable with a UNIX prompt but I still love the MacOS as well. The *BSD family is my favorite family of servers and MacOS is my favorite desktop OS. Here at home I have a FreeBSD server that manages my internet connection, does some web and email serving, firewalling, and caching proxy server work. It also makes a great MP3 player. :-)
The test rig:
Blue/White G3/350 overclocked to 387MHz
320MB RAM
IBM GXP75 30GB internal UDMA/100 drive
WD 10GB internal UDMA/33 drive
Adaptec 2930U SCSI card
Iomega external SCSI Zip
Umax Vista SCSI scanner
WD 30GB Firewire external hard drive