[CUBE] the desperate plea thing.

[J.C. Webber III]

Lacy Kyle wrote:
> Thanks very much for the sound advice, much appreciated. I am already 
> starting to feel more comfortable with OSX after only a few days. It is 

My pleasure.  Welcome to the best OS in the world!  IMHO.

> very true that certain ways of doing things need to be unlearnt and I 
> suppose the difficulty directly correlates with the length of time you 
> have been doing things the old way. (Which in my case, is just about 
> back to OS6)

I can relate to this, but from a different perspective.  I've never been
a Mac fan.  I've been using Unix (mostly from the command line) for 15
years.  I've always hated GUI applications because they always seem to
be employ incomplete subsets of their commandline versions.

About 3 years ago Apple purchased a startup company I was working for
and suddenly *I* was an Apple employee!  They plopped an OS9 machine
on my desk (next to my Solaris workstation) and I *hated* it.  It seemed
so unstructured and confusing.  I only used it when I had to to run
company applications (HR, bug tracking system, etc) that wouldn't run
on the Sun.  Since my job responsibilities revolved around supporting
the Unix engineering design environment we brought over with us from
that startup, I was quite content to just keep on using my Solaris
workstation for my daily needs.

But when OSX came out I gave the Mac another look.  Even though it's
Unix under the hood, and I can get to the command line from the Terminal
app if I feel the need, I find that I rarely have the need.  I am now
quite comfortable with the Aqua desktop and I do most tasks with simple
mouse clicks now 8^).

I love this machine!  My home systems have always been Linux (and my
web, email, and print server still runs Linux), but I've purchased
an iMac, Cube, and iBook for my personal computing use and I couldn't
be happier.

> 
> I admit to feeling rather intimidated by all those spuriously named 
> folders and documents in the new system and library folders. Don't 
> worry, I had a peek but didn't touch anything, but it did rather remind 
> me of all the stuff on my NT machine I am forced to use at work.

I just took a look under /System/Library and the directory (folder) names
under there look logical to me, but I don't really need to concern myself
with them anyway.  These files belong to the OS and it does a very good
job managing them all by itself.  After a year of using OSX I've not
found the need to go poking around in the System files on my own.  I
guess because nothing has ever broken that required me to 'go fix it'.

And this comment from a 15 year Unix System Administrator!

> 
> Thanks again for all your help.

No prob.

> 
> The problem with my machine by the way seems to be that it ill lock up 
> after 5 to 10 minutes or so whenever a disc is in the drive. When the 
> drive is empty it will stay up ad infinitum but becomes monster 
> unstable as soon as a disc is in there even if the disc is not in 
> use......even a music CD.........

First thought that comes to my mind is a hardware problem.  Is your 
machine still covered under Apple Warrenty?

Also, it could be a conflict of some sort between the original OS9
on your machine and OSX (I'm guessing here).  Maybe a scratch install
of both (though drastic) is your best approach.  To tell you the truth,
I don't know how to troubleshoot things like this on the Mac.  On other
Unix platforms I would have some ideas about what processes to monitor
or attach a trace (truss on Solaris, strace on Linux) to a running
process to see what it was doing.  But on the Mac I haven't had the
need, so I've not developed those troubleshooting skills (yet).

Best of luck with it, I'm sure you'll work it out eventually because
it's not a general problem that everyone's having.  So it has to be
some sort of hardware problemm or software misconfiguration on your box.

-- 
J.C. Webber III       
Technical Lead, Unix System Administrator
jcw at kingoblio.com (home) www.kingoblio.com