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OS X and Java – An Amazing Experience

I just posted this to Slashdot as a reply to one of the articles about OS X. I thought I’d share it with you as it relates to the last article somewhat. Its kind of unedited, written for a Linux crowd.

I just wanted to relate my experience with 10.1 last week. I got a copy after months of procrastination and installed it on a G3 450mhz (the Blue and White type). I’d also like to note that I’m not really trying to start a flame war. I am a big fan of *nixes in general (I first worked on a PDP11 running some kind of Nix back in 82), I am also (strangely for a nix zealot) a huge Mac fan. I’m not a big fan of any Nix GUI nor of windows. Mainly I’m posting this because for the first time in several jaded years, something in mainstream Computing made me go “Wow!”. Forget the iPod. The experience below has just made me decide that OSX is an incredible achievement.


Hi Jason,

I just posted this to Slashdot as a reply to one of the articles about OS X. I thought I’d share it with you as it relates to the last article somewhat. Its kind of unedited, written for a Linux crowd.

I just wanted to relate my experience with 10.1 last week. I got a copy after months of procrastination and installed it on a G3 450mhz (the Blue and White type). I’d also like to note that I’m not really trying to start a flame war. I am a big fan of *nixes in general (I first worked on a PDP11 running some kind of Nix back in 82), I am also (strangely for a nix zealot) a huge Mac fan. I’m not a big fan of any Nix GUI nor of windows. Mainly I’m posting this because for the first time in several jaded years, something in mainstream Computing made me go “Wow!”. Forget the iPod. The experience below has just made me decide that OSX is an incredible achievement.

The install was the easiest I have ever done, especially amazing considering there is a *Nix beneath. I went from 9.0 to 9.1, 9.1 to 10, 10 to 10.1 and finally upgraded the 9.1 to 9.2 The only hiccup was that I only got developer tools for 10.0 — they don’t work with 10.1 — and although I bought a 10.1 Installation, that kit didn’t come with 10.1 developers tools — download from connect.apple.com.

So far so good — it isn’t rocket fast, but not slow enough to impair productivity at all.

My long term aim is a Powerbook running my work development environment which is Dynamo and Weblogic based. I really dislike my Tecra 8100.

So, the rest of the afternoon I checked out our CVS tree — all 300 Megs…. Yes — I was able to switch to ZSH, and access CVS via SSH without installing a single piece of software (other than creating a zshenv with CVSROOT etc set).

Next day I started a build, and after a couple of minor hitches (differences with FIND and RM, and PERL in the wrong place (bin not local/bin), I had a clean build. Took a little while, but by the end of the afternoon I had a ATG Dynamo server running our web applications….

Amazingly simple. Everything just *WORKED*.

My only problem is that Java based disk access is *VERY SLOW*.

I did some basic benchmarks against my Toshiba Tecra (650 mhz). The Mac (450mhz) during Memory and CPU based processing ran about the same speed as the 650mhz. However disk access was twice as slow as the laptop — anyone got any ideas ? Recall I installed on a pre-existing HFS+ disk that had OS9.1 on it. Can anyone recommend a disk tuning utility ? Should I rebuild from scratch with a different disk format?

In Summary — OS X 10.1 rocks if you want to use Java 1.3 in a Unix environment – project Builder looks sweet , though I haven’t played with it. 2 easy days work and I had a new development environment. I think it took me a month or so with my Redhat 6.2 on that Tecra. All I want now is a Quartz/Carbon based Emacs 🙂 oh yeah, that and a Titanium powerbook so I can trash that Tecra 🙂

By Jason O'Grady

Founded the PowerPage in 1995.