Pretty it is, quality it ain't (Mac OS X)

Member Name: Flup

Product:	Mac OS X
Date:	23/05/02 (508 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very, very pretty, Multimedia integration, Unix-based

Disadvantages: Rough around the edges, Cross-platform integration is poor, GUI can be confusing to use

I'm a Unix sysadmin, so when the Powers That Be told me that two G4s were turning up and I have to support them, I turned a whiter shade of pale. When they did arrive, however, installing them was an absolute breeze and after playing with the almost infeasibly pretty GUI, to my initial delight I found a small icon marked "Terminal". Could it be? Could Apple have finally provided a command-line interface?

The answer, like so many things to do with Macs, is "well, sort of". It seems that this OS is built on top of an implementation of BSD Unix that Apple have called "Darwin". When I found this and started to poke around a bit, it really did look convincingly Unixy: every command I tried returned something that made sense. This would be easy, I thought: I'll just configure it in the same way as all the other brands of Unix in the building.

Wrong! The first thing I tried to do was configure the thing to use NIS instead of its own bizarre database (called "NetInfo"), and as soon as I did this, it started running so slowly that I wondered if I had a network problem. I analysed the traffic between the Mac and our NIS servers, and found that it's just down to bad implementation: the box was dumping entire maps over and over again, when all that was needed was a single lookup. Shoddy, shoddy coding.

OK, I thought, we'll have to use local accounts: they're going to be single-user machines anyway. I found the NetInfo GUI tool and created the accounts, making sure that their UIDs and passwords matched those used by everything else.

The next step was to mount our fileservers. About 10 minutes on Apple's tech support website (which is very good, by the way) told me that, while it could mount Windows shares, mounting more than one at a time could cause a kernel panic (a crash). Again, very shoddy. So, I resorted to NFS mounts, which (after I figured out the syntax) work
ed fine. I never did manage to get automount to work, but I didn't try very hard after I found out that an /etc/auto_master map isn't supported (another sigh).

I wrote everything up and delivered the machines. Ten minutes later, I get a phone call: although the fileservers are mounted, the application can't see the files. It seems that some apps were written for MacOS 9, and instead of writing some decent code to support them, the thing just launches the entire MacOS 9 environment on top of MacOS X. As MacOS 9 didn't support NFS, the mounts are invisible. D'oh d'oh d'oh.

Doubtless these problems are all fixable, but my point is that they shouldn't be there in the first place. Apple seem to have concentrated entirely on the look and feel, which is very pretty and slick, while ignoring or bodging the problems they've created by redesigning the OS around Unix. By doing this, they've turned into another Microsoft: the outside is polished, but the inside is grubby and covered in oil.

Summary: