Power User / College student

I just recently switched over from Windows to Mac, I'm pretty happy with my choice so far.

Being a network admin for my past school, having a history with Unix and the like, I hope to major in computer science in school. Programming will be a must, and I was wondering how much of Darwin is accessible through OSX. I understand there is the terminal, but how "hardcore" can one get with a Mac?

I'd like to take my powerbook to its full potential, especially the unix side if possible.

Are there any resources that I could look through, or things I can google.

Any direction would be greatly appreciated.

How "hardcore" can one get with a Mac? Extremely A history in Unix means that you don't need Mac Janitor: repair permissions. After every software update, and about every 2 weeks: close all apps and log totally off. Log on, go in Finder, Applications. Utilities, Disk Utility. After the message -getting disk information- select volume (below the hard drive name -upper left corner). Just highlight it. Now look to the lower two things are there near the middle, verify permissions, repair permissions. Click repair permissions. Also make sure you run cron tasks Finder, Applications. Utilities Terminal type (switching to root - superuser) sudo sh /etc/daily > this needs to be done /weekly (instead of daily) and monthly. again with all apps closed

Xcode is a pretty good development tool - it comes with the OS (although you have to choose to install the developer tools I think - check your OS disks for the package if you haven't installed it yet). It handles most languages (Java included if that's what you're taught in first year computer science). Make sure you install the BSD subsystem too.

The terminal is almost exactly the same as you'll find in other versions of *nix. Personally I can't name any differences but I don't use it on a daily basis - maybe somebody else knows a bit more.

Have a dig through the utilities folder - it contains some handy networking applications, disk/file utilities (funnily enough) as well as some general system tools.

Start out with Apple's developer resources over at
http://developer.apple.com/macosx/
There's also an O'Riley book, Mac OS X for Unix Geeks, that might be of interest to you.

You can access the Darwin command line directly (without going through Terminal) if you want. Set the login screen to show "name and password" (instead of "list of users") in System Preferences. Then log out, and enter ">console" as the username.

You can do anything with Mac OS that you can under Unix, including using X11 and Linux APIs. Additionally there is a front-end package manager for Mac OS called Fink. It can be downloaded at http://fink.sourceforge.net . Basically they port Unix/Linux apps to work directly under Darwin, and use automated dependency FTP downloading via Debian's apt-get and possibly RPM (don't quote me on that). This will be something you'll need for any sort of CS schooling (or engineering in my case).

Other things such as SSH are all built right into Darwin. You can log into your Mac remotely and for instance kill a PID if something went AWOL and your system is locked. Other things like load balancing and distributed computing (Mac Beowulf cluster anyone?) can all be done as well. Lastly, handy tools like uptime, top, etc are all there for use.

And...as whitshark said, you can run little cleaning scripts.