Notes (Mac OS X)

Having three different machines running Mac OS X, Fedora F8 Linux, and Windows XP, respectively, really gives one a ``three-ring circus'' experience. It's sometimes confusing to operate one display, two keyboards, and three mice. Also, the Mac OS X environment includes a virtual Windows environment, as well as typically several X windows connected to my Linux machine (using xhost and ssh -X). I really like VMware's ``unity'' mode in which Windows applications share the same desktop as Mac apps. (In that case, the Windows apps may be launched from a VMware menu.) I can almost drive everything from the Mac.

Related to the previous point, one thing that annoys me very much in emacs on Linux is that one must be very careful to press modifier keys such as meta and shift in the right order. This issue disappears when driving from the Mac. The issue appeared relatively recently in Linux, perhaps somewhere around Fedora 6.

Misc. Remarks:

• On the Macbook Pro, I miss the ``page up'' and ``page down'' keys for scrolling up or down by one screenful. Often <fn> <up/down arrow> works, or sometimes <command> <arrow>, but neither works reliably across all applications. Regression!

• Instead of upgrading my Belkin OmniView switcher, I'm connecting the Mac Pro directly to the digital input of my Dell monitor. The Belkin drives the monitor's analog input from either the Linux or Windows machine. At some point I may get an all-digital (DVI-D) video switcher. It might only need to be two-way if I can ultimately retire my ailing Windows machine. If I can get comfortable driving everything from the Mac, I won't need it at all.

• I originally planned to start running the Mac version of Quicken, but after reading comments on the Web, I decided I was better off running the Windows version of Quicken in my VMware virtual Windows machine. Since Quicken flows into Turbotax, I probably want to keep using the Windows version of that as well.

• I also planned to run Eudora natively, but this was not easy to set up.⁴I'm therefore running Eudora in virtual Windows on the Mac, and this is so far working out great.

• Sound did not work in VMware Fusion at first. I thought sound was ok on the Mac because it played a boot-up sound on the internal speaker, and pd-extended's audio checker (via portaudio) was working fine. After at least an hour of fooling around, I finally determined that the failure was due to the default output on the Mac Pro being the digital output. (See ``Applications / System Preferences / Sound / Output''.) You have to select exactly one of ``digital out'', ``line out'', or ``headphones out''. It seems completely unbelievable that one cannot have more than one sound output connector operating at a time, especially line out and headphones out for Pete's sake! Is Apple trying to save a few cents on an audio output signal buffer in a $3K system? This makes no sense to me at all. Well, I'll be using the digital output soon enough, so I'm going to try to forget about analog audio (non)support on the Mac Pro. On second thought, perhaps it's just software senility: portaudio evidently ignores this setting and drives all the audio outputs (though I've only checked the headphone out at this point from Pd). I am always amazed by how many switches there are in the sound path that can result in ``no sound''.

• Attempting to burn a CD-R audio disk from Windows Media Player 11 within VMware just hanged forever waiting for a blank CD to be inserted. The disk was later declared ``not blank'' by iTunes -- another disk for the coaster collection.

• Compiling a large LaTeX book in PDF took 25 seconds on the Mac Pro and half a second longer on my quad-core Linux system, according to the command ``time make pdf > /dev/null''. The Mac quad-cores are running at 2.8 GHz with 2GB of memory while the Linux quad-cores are at 2.4 GHz with 4GB of memory. The disks should be about the same. The ps2pdf utility seems slower than it should be (single-threaded?).

• While it is slightly slower, I presently prefer my Linux box for book development because of its more ergonomic keyboard. I also find xpdf easier to use than Preview when checking PDFs. Preview has the significant advantage of being able to ``crop all pages'' within the inspector (according to a current text selection using the ``select tool''), but I haven't found a way to crop automatically in the Makefile (possibly Automator can do it, but I'll have to spend some time learning about that -- it did not work to guess my way through its UI). Also, embedded hyperlinks in the PDF work from xpdf but not Preview, as far as I can tell.

• I was impressed to see that latex2html worked as well as it did right out of the box (as installed by port).

• The first snag I hit compiling my books on the Mac Pro was the absence of the file fancyheadings.sty, which was not contained in texlive. For now, I've added fancyheadings.sty to my svn repo for the books, and I've found no further problems (to my amazement).
  • As of 12/31/08, on my machine, four ports (latex2html, bibtool, doxygen, texmacs) depend on texlive [Also LyX needs texlive], while only one (xdvipdfmx) depends on tetex (now discontinued, and supposedly absorbed 100% into TeX Live).
    port uninstall xdvipdfmx tetex.]

• The second snag compiling my books was that latex2html creates a file index.html that is a hard link to [book-name].html, and it also creates Index.html for the Index section of the book (you know--a normal index). The problem is of course that the Mac OS X filesystem is case-insensitive by default, so the book index is lost in the HTML version. One solution is to compile HTML versions of my books (and anything else having an index section) on Linux machines only. Another (which I use) is to override the appropriate line in sub english_titles to become

      $idx_title = "Index for this Document";
  

  Since `for' is included (in the same sub) within $GENERIC_WORDS (i.e., words not to be included in generated filenames), the Index file becomes Index_this_Document.html instead of the usual Index.html.

• I moved my HP LaserJet 3380 to the Mac Pro (via USB), and I've been able to print to it from the Mac environment and from Windows in VMware, but not consistently. Printing often hangs the printing app, requiring rebooting (at least rebooting fixed things).

• At some point printing stopped working completely from Windows. It took me a while to figure out that I had to click on one of the USB icons in the lower-right corner of the screen and explicitly connect to the local HP Laserjet 3380 on the Mac. Perhaps the previous item involved some apps being disconnected and others not?

• I was able to print from AbiWord (part of GNOME Office) originally from the Mac, but after installing and updating the HP software for the 3380, AbiWord now hangs forever when trying to print. Also, when it did print, the output looked pretty bad (poor font spacing).

• It's also very hard to edit in AbiWord due to layout errors on the screen, especially when editing. So, for Word-type documents, I'll either need to run MS Word in VMware, or spring for the Mac version.

• Burning a DVD was surprisingly hard to figure out: It can be done in the Disk Utility application, but not in the ``obvious way'' of setting up the source and destination fields and clicking the ``Burn'' button. Instead, you set up the source only and click ``Burn'' and it automatically burns to the ``SuperDrive''. Thus, in the Disk Utility, set up the source field by, e.g., dragging the .iso file from the Finder, (or select ``File / Open Disk Image'' in its menu and browse to your .iso image), click the ``Burn'' button, and insert a blank DVD-R disk if you haven't already.