After buying my iBook I have installed on it Linux (Kubuntu 6.06 flavor).

All is working nice (except the wifi card, but I’m working to fix…) but Mac is an old school company, with a very nice OS (and it’s Unix too, like Linux) so I begun using OSX some weeks ago (I have setup a dual boot iBook OSX/Kubuntu).
Using OSX is painless, it’s a roboust Unix with a nice GUI (not X11, but it can support X applications on a dedicated “emulation” layer) and is really easy to configure (compared to Linux).

When I’m using a new OS, I try to recreate the same applications suite that I’m using into my all days systems (I use the same software, if it’s available, like Firefox). This is the my OSX Essentials list (Note: this is a list of free software, if not GPL):

– Web Browsers
Mozilla Firefox
The WEB browser

Camino
A Gecko engine with a fully integrated OS X interface

– Web Editors
NVU
A WYSIWYG HTML editor

– Instant Messaging
Adium
ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Gtalkand more

– Email Client
Thunderbird
A great email client, I prefer KMail, but it’s only for KDE…

– Media Player
VLC
A decent media player, with all needed codecs

FTP – Files Transfers
Cyberduck
A FTP gui, with support for SCP and FTP over SSH

– Filesystems access
ext2fsx
Driver to access EXT2/3 partitions from OSX

– Password Manager
KeePassX
The final password manager tool. You can use the same database with KeePass for Windows, Linux and OS X

Password Gorilla
This is a cross platform password manager, compatible with Password Safe (it run also under PPC Linux!!!)

– Remote Access

VNCviewer
A simple and light VNC client

Remote Desktop Connection
RDP client from Microsoft

Chicken VNC
A nice VNC client

– Graphics
Inkscape
A very great vector graphics editor. On SVG steroids 🙂

Gimp.app
The Gimp ported to OS X, you need only the X11 layer to use it.

On this page you can find all useful keyboard shortcut on OSX system.

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