[Kde-nonlinux] Considering Imac

[Jonathan Stickel]

I just made the transition from Gentoo Linux, with heavy use of KDE 
apps, to Mac OS X.  It has gone fairly well, but the Unix environment 
that Mac OS X uses has a few "quirks".  For example, the way shared 
libraries are handled is different in ways I don't understand, and the 
file system is not case sensitive which can bite you now and again.  I 
comment on a couple of your questions below.

John Velman wrote:
>> Your KDE options for iMacs:
>> 1: Install KDE4 via http://ranger.users.finkproject.org/kde/index.php/Home
>> This is not the KDE desktop, rather it sits on top of OS X. You get all 
>> the libs and apps.
> 
> This sounds pretty good, and I think I understand it!

I tried this out and found that it didn't work for me.  Perhaps this is 
because it is still "alpha".  I also found the new "dolphin" file 
manager to not work very well, at least not yet (konqueror is setup for 
web browsing only in KDE4).  Maybe it will be better after bugs are 
worked out.

> 
>> 2: Install KDE3 via Fink or MacPorts:
>> http://ranger.users.finkproject.org/kde/index.php/KDE_3_on_Mac_OS_X
>> Fink is apt-get for OS X, with the difference that the graphical apps 
>> require X11 xserver.b This means you can run them on top of OS X, as 
>> with KDE4, or have the complete desktop environment.
>> MacPorts is portage for OS X; haven't used it much so not quite sure how 
>> it works.
> 
> What does it mean to use the X11 server and "run them on top of OS X"?  Is
> the X server somehow in parallel to the native GUI or does one switch from
> one to the other?  If using X11 does one still have all the nice MAC things
> available?  This may be important to me, since it appears that some other
> apps I want to run use X11.  

This all worked easily for me.  I don't know what is standard for OS X 
10.4 since I got a corporate setup Mac, but OS X development tools and 
X11 were already installed and configured on my machine.  I tried out 
MacPorts first, but found that Fink had more packages available and 
switched over.  The KDE3 installed in either MacPorts or Fink works just 
fine, other than trouble copying text from OS X apps to KDE apps.  You 
can either run X11 apps directly inside OS X (same window bars and 
stuff), or you can run X11 apps in it's own separate windows manager 
that you get to with a keystroke.  I do the former and am satisfied. 
The only negative is that when cycling through apps (cmd-tab), the X11 
apps do not show, only the so-called 'X11' app.


>> 3: Use a Virtual Machine.
>> There's lots of VM systems for OS X: Parallels, VMWare Fusion, Virtual 
>> Box. You're basically running linux (or BSD or whatever) in a window on 
>> top of OS X. Full desktop environment. I use VMWare to run Kubuntu on OS 
>> X, mainly because VMware cares about linux, especially Ubuntu. Virtual 
>> Box is gpl, and Parallels only cares about running windows.
>>
>> http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/
>> http://www.virtualbox.org/
>> http://www.parallels.com/
>>
> 
> Do these run transparently on the OS X desktop?   Or are the apps
> somehow "sequestered" in a separate window?  (Or a separate desktop or?)

I would avoid running a VM.  For me, the whole point of getting a Mac 
was to run corporate apps AND unix apps without using a virtual machine.

Regards,
Jonathan