Tuesday, August 14, 2007
( 12:57 PM ) #permalink
MacBook Pro setup notes
Loving my new MacBook Pro, the first mac I have ever had that was a) POWERFUL and b) Not my employer's. Some notes about Mac setup and my personal preferences.
- Go ctrl+click on desktop -> Show View options -> Show item info. This gives you size, and used info on drives shown on your desktop.
- Mac Mail and IMAP. You may have "Save sent messages on server" but if you don't highlight a folder from your imap ones and click menu bar Mailbox-> Use this folder for... -> Sent messages - they won't be saved. How Thunderbird does this without prompting, but mac Mail doesn't, bewilders me.
- Keyboard? In system preferences enable "place two fingers on track pad and click for secondary click". This is in addition to ctrl+clicking. Feels a bit odd for a while, but soon becomes natural, as does scrolling with two fingers. Also, you might want to have a timeout on the (lovely) light sensitive, backlit keyboard if, like me, you have your MBP playing you movies in maximum darkness. =)
- Want to tunnel SMTP from your mail server? I have a little sh script.
ssh -L 7000:mymailserver.net:25 me@mymailserver.net
which forwards port 25 to my local machine on port 7000 (just a nice high number). You can then tell Mail to use localhost port 7000 for sending mail. Nice. Ought to make this execute on boot but that is left to an exercise for the reader. - Want to play Eve online with your MBP? =) VMware fusion is not (yet) much good, Bootcamp (dual boot) is good and free, but even better is Crossover, a commercial application that allows Windows apps to run within your OS X session, and you don't need a copy of XP to install! They are lovely people and are actively working getting Eve (and other favourite games and apps) as nice as possible. They deserve your 60 USD.
- Essential apps? Quicktime Pro. It costs a little, but will only make you mad if you only use the free one. Transmission. Excellent light and simple bittorret client. Handbrake. Rip your DVDs to Mpeg4s. VLC. Play any video, or VIDEO_TS folder. Flip4Mac. Free plugin to QT that allows play of Windows media files (works for web embedded streams too). Firefox of course.
- Office? In defiance of M$ I have not opted to enable my free Office trial but instead have downloaded an alpha (warning! warning! May self destruct taking your data with it!) of OpenOffice that is the new native Aqua version. A bit buggy, but usable. You can always download the more stable X11 version if unsure. Don't forget you can change the file type association from MSOffice to OpenOffice by, in Finder, highlighting an office file -> File -> Get Info -> Open with -> OpenOffice (change all).
- Get open source packages such as wget in the same fashion as command line debian apt-get. Install fink.
- If you'll be developing on your mac get the latest Xcode from Apple (free registration required). This has gcc and other useful tools.
- Create a command line database for finding files in terminal.
sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb
Labels: EVE online, Mac tips
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