Mac

The "From Mac to Linux" Issue

Bryan Lunduke — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 15:00:00 +0000

What you are reading right now is a Linux magazine—with a focus on Apple computers running macOS. (Or MacOS. Or however Apple is doing the capitalization nowadays.)

I know, it's weird. It's extremely weird—like cats and dogs living together weird.

But we're not here to bash on Apple. Neither are we here to sing praises to those down in Cupertino.

The reality is, many within the Open Source and Free Software worlds do use Macintoshes—at least a portion of the time—and there are some unique challenges that pop up when you need to use both macOS and Linux on a regular basis. Likewise, many people have moved from Mac to Linux as part of their computing journey, and we'd like to offer some tips and ideas to help them out.

(And if we help a few Mac users feel a bit more confident in making the switch over to Linux? Well, that's just gravy on top.)

Never used a Macintosh before? There's some interesting technical tidbits held within these pages that might come in handy when interacting with co-workers that utilize a number of Mac-specific file types and programs. Or, at the very least, the various distinct differences between the platforms are sure to provide a bit of amusement. Who doesn't want to know how Mac filesystems work? You'll be the life of the party!

We kick everything off with a delightful tale we call "Hello Again, Linux" by a gentleman named Richard Mavis who recounts his own story of how he switched from Windows to Mac, then from Mac to Linux. He describes what hardware and software he used, what prompted his change, and how the entire experience went.

Then we get into the meat and potatoes of some of the more "Macintosh-y" things you can do from your Linux desktop.

We begin with "Accessing Those Old MacOS Volumes" by Linux Journal Editor at Large, Petros Koutoupis. In it, Petros walks through the process of how to mount (and read/write) Macintosh volumes (hard drives and so on) that were formatted with "Hierarchical File System Plus" (usually called "HFS+"). This process can be a royal pain in the posterior, so having it written down with step-by-step instructions is simply too handy for words.

Then I cover the various software and packages that allow Linux (and, to a lesser extent, some UNIX variants) to read and write some of the Mac-specific file types out there: DMG files, SIT files, ClarisWorks files and so on. I cover how to open them all, right on your Linux computer. No Mac required.

But let's say you're a Mac software developer. You've got a small mountain of code written in Objective-C using the Cocoa framework. Don't want to lose that massive investment in time and knowledge when you make the move to Linux? Petros Koutoupis provides an introduction to the free software re-implementation of Apple's closed-source frameworks in "Porting Mac OS Applications to Linux with GNUstep".

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Hello Again, Linux

Richard Mavis — Fri, 31 May 2019 13:26:34 +0000

by Richard Mavis

My first MacBook was the first computer I really loved, but I wasn't happy about the idea of buying a new one. I decided it's important to live your values and to support groups that value the things you do.

After ten years of faithful service, last year the time finally came to retire my MacBook. Not many laptops last ten years—not many companies produce a machine as durable and beautiful as Apple does—but, if one was available, I was willing to invest in a machine that might last me through the next ten years. A lot has changed in ten years—for Apple, for Linux and for myself—so I started looking around.

The Situation

Prior to 2006, I had used only Windows. Around that time, there was a lot of anxiety about its upcoming successor to Windows XP, which at the time was code-named Project Longhorn. My colleagues and I all were dreading it. So, rather than go through all that trouble, I switched to Linux.

However, my first experience with Linux was not great. Although 2006 was The Year of the Linux Desktop (I saw headlines on Digg proclaiming it almost every day), I quickly learned, right after wiping my brand-new laptop's hard drive to make way for Fedora, that maybe it wasn't quite The Year of the Linux Laptop. After a desperate and miserable weekend, I finally got my wireless card working, but that initial trauma left me leery. So, about a year later, when I decided to quit my job and try the digital nomad freelance thing, I bought a MacBook. A day spent hunting down driver files or recompiling my kernel was a day not making money. I needed the assurance and convenience Apple was selling. And it proved a great investment.

During the next decade, I dabbled with Linux. Every year seemed to be The Year of the Linux Desktop—the real one, at last—so on my desktop at work (freelancing wasn't fun for long), I installed Ubuntu, then Debian, then FreeBSD. An article in this journal introduced me to tiling window managers in general and DWM in particular. The first time I felt something like disappointment with my MacBook was after using DWM on Debian for the first time.

Through the years, as my MacBook's hardware failures became increasingly inconvenient, and as my personal preference in software shifted from big beautiful graphical applications to small command-line programs, Linux started to look much more appealing. And, Linux's hardware compatibility had expanded—companies had even started selling laptops with Linux already installed—so I felt reasonably sure I wouldn't need to waste another weekend struggling with a broken wireless connection or risk frying my monitor with a misconfigured Xorg.conf.

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Paragon Software Group's Paragon ExtFS for Mac

James Gray — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 11:11:10 +0000

by James Gray

Ever more Mac aficionados are discovering the virtues of Linux, especially when their older hardware can experience a renaissance. One annoying barrier to dual-boot nirvana is filesystem incompatibility, whereby the Linux side can access the Mac side, but Apple's macOS doesn't support Linux drives at all—not even in read-only mode.

A handy solution is Paragon Software Group's Paragon ExtFS for Mac, a low-level macOS filesystem driver designed to eliminate filesystem incompatibility between Linux and Mac operating systems. The solution grants transparent read/write access to ExtFS Linux partitions on macOS, allowing Mac users to access files fully that are stored on Linux volumes hassle-free, streamline data sharing and transfer up to 4GB+ files at a high rate.

The new 11th edition of ExtFS for Mac features a completely new UI and advanced features, including extended mounting options and a menu bar app allowing users one-click access to all ExtFS drives and instant execution of the most common volume operations—for example, volume mount, unmount and verify. Large volume support enables mounting volumes more than 2TB in size. ExtFS for Windows also is available from the company.

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Non-Linux FOSS: Homebrew

Shawn Powers — Thu, 05 Feb 2015 19:04:19 +0000

by Shawn Powers

I use OS X quite often during my day job. I'm able to tolerate it largely due to the terminal. If I couldn't do my work with green text on a black background, I think I'd go crazy (or crazier). Unfortunately, OS X doesn't come with all the command-line tools I need. That's where Homebrew comes in to save the day.

Homebrew acts like the package management system OS X is lacking. Using commands very similar to apt-get, it allows the installation of hundreds of applications. A perfect example is the wget program. I was surprised to find that OS X doesn't include wget, but with Homebrew, it's a simple one-liner away.

The best part is that Homebrew installs everything in the /usr/local file space. There's no reason to worry about Homebrew corrupting your system, because it doesn't touch anything outside of /usr/local. OS X system updates won't overwrite your programs, and because /usr/local/bin is already in the PATH, installed Homebrew apps just work!

Homebrew uses Ruby to manage its packages and functions, but it doesn't require any programming knowledge to use. And the installation procedure is literally a copy/paste on the command line. If you use OS X, but you wish you could install packages as easily as in Linux, give Homebrew a try: http://brew.sh.

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Non-Linux FOSS: libnotify, OS X Style

Shawn Powers — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:35:14 +0000

by Shawn Powers

One of the things I dislike about using Irssi in a terminal window on OS X is that I often miss the screen flash when someone mentions my name in IRC. With some fancy SSH tunneling (maybe more on that some other issue) and a really cool pop-up notification tool, if someone mentions my name, I can't miss it.

terminal-notifier is a command-line tool for creating OS X-native user notifications. It doesn't rewrite the concept of pop-ups; instead, it gives us nerds a way to add pop-ups to scripts (Figure 1). Because it uses the native notification system, it's easy to modify what sort of pop-up appears. I prefer the kind that doesn't go away until dismissed, but you can change that in the notification settings in OS X's preferences.

Figure 1. A quick command-line-ninja move creates a pop-up.

If you like pop-up notifications like libnotify, but find yourself on a Macintosh machine more often than not, terminal-notifier might be as useful for you as it is for me at my day job. Plus, now you know that if you mention my name in IRC during the workday, you'll make a window pop up on my screen! Get it at https://github.com/alloy/terminal-notifier.

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Non-Linux FOSS: Telephone

Shawn Powers — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Shawn Powers

Whether you're trying to use Google Voice and a free SIP service to get a free telephone system or trying to connect to your company's internal phone system, if you're on a Mac, you need a SIP client. A few free options exist, but none are as simple as Alexei Kuznetsov's Telephone.

Telephone even integrates with OS X's Contacts program, so you can make a SIP call directly from there. It's free, open source, and it's even available in the Apple App Store. If you need to make a VoIP call on your Macintosh, be sure to check out Telephone: http://www.tlphn.com.

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