To find out more about terminal commands, one uses their man-pages. The following are basic things that I learned almost twenty years ago, but if you're new to UNIX then not knowing little details like this can be a real obstacle: The commands for this are hdiutil attach and installer -pkg. dmg files) and run the installer purely from the command line. Even the installation of regular Mac OS X Applications can in principle be performed purely within a terminal. Try this with a harmless command like sudo ls, and you'll be prompted for the administrative password that you also use to start installations under Mac OS X.Īll this power is especially useful if you want to manipulate your Mac through some remote connection in that case the command line is your door into the computer, and if you have an administrator account it's essentially as if you're sitting in front of the computer. Of course, the original user account on a new Mac is also an administrator, but to invoke that power you'll need to precede a command by sudo. These kinds of operations require administrator privileges. The typical setup for a new computer is that you'll have created your acount in the directory /Users, and your permissions will not allow you to arbitrarily write to directories such as /usr/local (these are also hidden from the Finder). The Terminal application is the place where practically everything happens that you see described here.

This page addresses the question of how to get X11 and other UNIX software running under Tiger. This page is not about how useful the new features of Tiger are there are more than enough pages like that out there - if you're looking for general praise and criticism of features in OS X, look at some of my other pages. The starting point for these notes is a G4 or G5 Mac on which you have just upgraded from the Panther operating system to Tiger. This also contains discussion of specific software I consider useful. For old notes pertaining to pre-Tiger Mac OS X, see here. Tiger (Mac OS X version 10.4.x) is assumed here.

Most of the info on this page is also relevant for Leopard (Mac OS X version 10.5.x), but there's some additional Leopard-specific material on a new page.

Using Mac OS 10.4 Tiger with X11 and fink Set up the Mac OS X environment

Mac os x 10.4 download dmg