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Looking at the Macintosh OSX desktop and the Darwin UNIX operating system.

I am having a quick look at the Macintosh OSX desktop on an Apple Macintosh computer and the interface is very annoying indeed. The Finder does find files; but most of the results are not what you were looking for. And to take a screenshot you have to use quite a complex combination of keys to achieve that. Contrast that with the Gnome desktop on Linux where you just press the Print Screen key and it takes a screenshot and saves it in one operation. But the Macintosh desktops are very popular indeed with graphics design users that want to use the Adobe creative software to create graphics and websites with Dreamweaver.

Here is the kernel version that this computer is using.

Last login: Mon Oct 21 11:31:14 on ttys000
Teacher-Mac:~ admin$ uname -a
Darwin Teacher-Mac.local 12.4.0 Darwin Kernel Version 12.4.0: Wed May  1 17:57:12 PDT 2013; root:xnu-2050.24.15~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64

Here is how to list logged on users on a Macintosh machine.

Teacher-Mac:~ admin$ who am i
admin    ttys000  Oct 21 12:25

This is another method.

Teacher-Mac:~ admin$ finger -lmps
Login: admin          			Name: Admin
Directory: /Users/admin             	Shell: /bin/bash
On since Fri  6 Sep 13:34 (EST) on console, idle 44 days 21:53 (messages off)
On since Mon 21 Oct 12:25 (EST) on ttys000
No Mail.

Here is the bash builtin command for listing previous commands on a Macintosh UNIX system.

Teacher-Mac:~ admin$ hash
hits	command
   1	/usr/bin/finger
   1	/usr/bin/uname
   1	/usr/bin/who
   2	/usr/bin/users
   1	/usr/bin/w

To copy text on a Macintosh computer press the Command-V combination.

To paste text on a Macintosh computer press the Command-V combination.

It is very annoying that the End key on a Macintosh keyboard will not take you to the end of the line in a text editor. Another annoyance is that the Textedit editor saves in rtf format instead of plain text. But this is not really a worry.

Use this command on a Macintosh machine to show the amount of free space remaining.

Teacher-Mac:~ admin$ df -Hla
Filesystem     Size   Used  Avail Capacity  iused    ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   214G    65G   149G    31% 16005769 36300986   31%   /
/dev/disk0s4   285G   506M   284G     1%   123576 69423640    0%   /Volumes/TEMP STORAGE

Shown below is the command to show how much disk space a directory is taking up.

Teacher-Mac:~ admin$ du -Hh Documents/ROMS/
916K	Documents/ROMS//Atari2600_A-E
476K	Documents/ROMS//Atari2600_F-J
664K	Documents/ROMS//Atari2600_K-P
844K	Documents/ROMS//Atari2600_Q-S
388K	Documents/ROMS//Atari2600_T-Z
9.4M	Documents/ROMS/

And getting to the networking side of things; here is the command to show the ARP table.

Teacher-Mac:~ admin$ arp -a
? (172.18.31.1) at 0:26:f1:f5:3:0 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.3) at 0:1b:78:e9:b2:cb on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.21) at 3c:7:54:5b:b7:20 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.37) at 0:24:1d:c:8f:ae on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.42) at 0:20:4a:9c:3a:44 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.47) at 0:1f:f3:55:94:73 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.50) at 0:1e:37:3e:73:68 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.53) at 0:1f:f3:55:93:c9 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.54) at 3c:7:54:5c:62:9b on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.57) at 0:1f:f3:55:96:ac on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.61) at 3c:7:54:5b:ba:69 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.62) at 0:24:1d:c:8f:c2 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.64) at 0:1f:f3:55:96:7 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.66) at 40:2c:f4:2:9e:b5 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.67) at 0:1f:f3:55:91:e6 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.68) at 74:de:2b:93:c6:8 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.88) at 0:12:79:ad:3c:22 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.106) at 0:a:e4:13:9b:81 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]
? (172.18.31.255) at ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff on en0 ifscope [ethernet]

And if you want to get the IP address of your Macintosh computer; use this command.

Teacher-Mac:~ admin$ ifconfig 
lo0: flags=8049 mtu 16384
	options=3
	inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1 
	inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 
	inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 
gif0: flags=8010 mtu 1280
stf0: flags=0 mtu 1280
en0: flags=8863 mtu 1500
	options=2b
	ether 00:1f:f3:55:91:90 
	inet6 fe80::21f:f3ff:fe55:9190%en0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x4 
	inet 172.18.31.105 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 172.18.31.255
	media: autoselect (100baseTX )
	status: active
en1: flags=8823 mtu 1500
	ether 00:1f:5b:c4:0d:7a 
	media: autoselect ()
	status: inactive
fw0: flags=8863 mtu 4078
	lladdr 00:1f:f3:ff:fe:65:cc:50 
	media: autoselect 
	status: inactive

The en0 interface is the first Ethernet device attached to the Macintosh system. This has the IP address of 172.18.31.105. This is just like Linux; but the names of the interfaces are different. In summary; the bash shell that the Macintosh operating system uses is quite good; but the Finder and other features of Apple are more annoying. But if you put shortcuts to frequently used applications on the desktop or the dock; then this is less painful. The soft keyboard and the mouse is very annoying. At least you can use right click on a Macintosh now.

The Macintosh OSX desktop.
The Macintosh OSX desktop.

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