Re: [dev] Re: How do you cope with OSX? (if at all)

On Fri, 18 Mar 2011, pancake wrote:

> At the beggining I was using dwm+xterm on XQuartz, but it was pretty
> inneficient and anoying.
>
> I have not
> found any decent tiling (or even non-tiling) window manager for OSX. So I
> stay in a fullscreen shell and ssh to the linux vm.

dwm works very, very well for me. The only issue is that you have to
rebuild all your apps to work under x11. So far that hasn't been a blocker
for me. Depends on what you need to use. This setup is very fast, I
haven't had any performance issues. Not sure if this is due to some flaw
in XQuartz or not - I would try X11.app if you want to give it a go again,
works really well for me.

> to install dwm in osx, you can just replace the /usr/bin/quartz-wm binary and
> kill XQuartz.

I would say that is not quite optimal, at least if you need to use Aqua
apps regularly - my setup preserves quartz-wm and launches it for clipboard
proxying so it's easy to copy/paste between X11 and Aqua.

> I plan to install linux natively at some point, but it's the work's laptop
> and i dont have much spare time to do this. (it's a macbookair 11")

Ubuntu works very well and has a setup page for it. Arch has a similarly
detailed page but I can't speak to how well it works on the hardware.
Whatever you go with I would be very interested in hearing about your
results - I want to switch my MB back to a Linux distro at some point.

> >
On 03/18/11 17:15, Isaac Raway wrote: >>
>> So, I had to join this list because someone sent me this thread this
>> morning. Just so happens I have been doing exactly this...
>>
>> From: Anselm R Garbe <garbeam_AT_gmail.com>
>> Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:23:24 +0100
>>
>>> at work I have to use OSX (on a MacBook Pro 13") for various reasons
>>> and wonder if anyone is using dwm in conjunction with OSX?
>>
>> I have a similar environment, although by choice - I prefer mac hardware
>> and have liked Mac OS X quite a bit. I used to run Ubuntu on my MacBook
>> (non-pro) 13" however due to software needs at work I have switched back to
>> Mac OS X.
>>
>>> Any recommendations you'd like to share?
>>
>> Oh yes. I use the following setup on two iMacs and a MacBook.
>>
>> I run Apple's X11.app with the dock set to auto hide. I have found
>> fullscreen X11 to be a major pain. It might not be as much of an issue if
>> you never have to use Aqua apps, but I do sometimes so hiding the dock is
>> good enough for me.
>>
>> To do builds you obviously need XCode installed.
>>
>> I am using dwm compiled from the tar ball, works like a champ after you go
>> through a few setup steps. This is my modified set of instructions to get
>> dwm working under X11.app: https://gist.github.com/864399
>>
>> For general software I have Fink as well as MacPorts installed. If you're
>> on 10.6 then you will be building form source in Fink. Sort of a pain but
>> once you build a few large apps (Firefox for instance), everything else
>> will go pretty well. Older versions of OS X have binary packages available.
>> I can't comment on the quality of those builds since I have been doing
>> everything from source.
>>
>> From fink I obtained and use mc, geany, gedit, and alpine. From MacPorts I
>> obtained bitlbee and irssi. Built a few other things from tar balls such as
>> calc. ./configure, make, make install work in about 90% of cases without
>> any problems at all. Otherwise I use Fink mainly - it seems to have more
>> working packages than MacPorts (ports version of Firefox is
>> ancient and only works on PPC for instance).
>>
>> Don't expect to have a fully functional system for the first day or so
>> working with Fink. Firefox took about 4 or 6 hours to build on my various
>> machines, but had no issues. All that time just so I can run a browser in
>> dwm ;)
>>
>> Make sure you get the latest Java SDK from Apple's website - there are some
>> virtual dependencies in Fink that require this to be installed (a package
>> named something like java-dev is just a stub for the latest SDK available
>> from Apple).
>>
>> That's the basics... I am sure I'm forgeting a bunch of stuff, but it is
>> certainly doable and I actually love the setup - I can still use Word and
>> Photoshop (no comment on that please, it is part of my job), but I can
>> stick to a clean tiling window manager and mainly text mode apps almost all
>> the rest of the time.
>>
>> If you have any questions let me know, I have been using this setup as my
>> primary environment for a couple weeks and I'm loving it.
>>
>
>
>
Received on Fri Mar 18 2011 - 17:30:28 CET