Added by Jan Strube, last edited by Jan Strube on Aug 06, 2007  (view change) show comment

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Prerequisites

On this page I assume you are transitioning from a GNU/Linux background. At first you will want to install tools that are familiar to you before venturing out to learning your new Mac OS X environment.

Open source software

Terminal

is a better alternative to the Terminal application that comes with Mac OS X. Tabs help you avoid having too many windows clutter your screen space.

X11

Apple ships Mac OS X with a version of the X11 window system. You can install it from the installation CD or from the web.

FTP client

Cyberduck is a graphical FTP client that is very comfortable to use. I has support for sftp and remembers your favourite locations if you want.

QuickSilver

Quicksilver is a very useful application that integrates nicely with your applications and helps you get things done much faster. For beginners, the most useful feature is certainly the CTRL+Space shortcut that lets you start applications quickly without having to navigate through the Applications or other folders first.

Open source programs

There are two main distributions of open source software that I'm aware of
fink uses the Debian tool chain to distribute the packages and has a GUI called FinkCommander that lets you easily browse and search for available software.

MacPorts is another distribution of free software for Mac OS X.

Either system is probably supplying all the tools that you are used to from Linux and that you will need for your work.

LaTeX

One of the most widely used typesetting systems in physics.

Distribution

There has been a lot of development in LaTeX and most other references point to obsolete distributions and packages. The newer distributions contain pdflatex and produce pdf files rather than the older tex->dvi->ps/pdf sequence. In addition, they can be used with pdf files as image format. PDF files are usually smaller than other resolution independent formats like eps. In addition pdf is the preferred format for images and docs on Mac OS X.

Editors

  • TexShop This editor, which is hosted by the University of Oregon, is one of the oldest, most mature and most commonly known LaTeX editors for Mac OS X.
  • iTeXMac2 is a very powerful editor with good support for projects.
  • Aquamacs is emacs in a native Mac OS X environment. Chances are that you have used emacs if you come from a Linux background. Aquamacs offers more commonly used keyboard shortcuts by default, in addition to the standard emacs ones. It has great support for LaTeX via AucTeX and the capability to render equations and images inline with the text. This is a great feature for files with a limited number of images.
  • TeXMaker is my personal favourite. Like some of the others it has good support for projects (documents consisting of multpile files). Additionally, it parses the structure of your document and lets you quickly skip to subsections and floats and displays a list with all labels of the current document.
  • LyX is not really a LaTeX editor, since by default it uses its own file format, but it can easily export to LaTeX and works very well together with the existing LaTeX installation. For new documents and people who have never used LaTeX before, this is a very good option.

Interaction with the rest of Mac OS X

Jens Nöckel's Homepage at the University of Oregon is an excellent site with advanced pointers, not all of them pertaining to LaTeX

Remote Assistance

There are a couple of commercial solutions if you want to obtain assistance over the network. However, there is a no-cost way to achieve the same goal. I have personally tested it and can say it works quite nicely. The person that wants to receive help simply has to enable Sharing as described on the web page. The person giving help can then use Chicken of the VNC to connect to the remote machine and take over control (if so desired).

org.lcsim

I suggest to use this page as an entry point to get started with an org.lcsim analysis. In case netbeans doesn't work for you, there are some instructions for Eclipse. (Probably a bit outdated)

Misc links

http://hitoshi.berkeley.edu/macosx/
http://www.astro.cornell.edu/staff/loredo/unix2mac/