Macintosh Notes

These are notes made when/after getting Julene a MacBook Air.


How to fix "unnatural" scrolling

You can fix the way a mouse scroll wheel works on the Macintosh the mouse settings in System Preferences. Just uncheck the natural scrolling checkbox.


How to get the console

Mount the Terminal application on the Dock. This application is found by launching the Finder, clicking on Applications, then on Utilities, then scrolling down to Terminal. Just launch it to get it on the Dock.


sudo on the Macintosh

To get root, do sudo bash. You'll only need to type in your password. You can make this permanent and passwordless using visudo just as on Linux.


.bashrc on the Macintosh

To edit .bashrc, use .profile instead. Then close the terminal and re-open it to get the changes. These aliases are particularly useful:

alias ll='ls -al'
alias fl='ls -F'
alias pu=pushd
alias po=popd

How to mount an ISO file from the filesystem

I once ordered Macintosh software as a CD. Then I discovered there was no CD drive in the MacBook Air. (Forgive me, I'm not a Macintosh guy and didn't realize that until I went to install the software.) So I created an ISO, which the Macintosh OS is apparently happy to load. To see how I did this, look here.

Next, here's what it looks like from the MacBook Air side...

Julenes-MacBook-Air:Downloads julene$ mkdir MacQuicken
Julenes-MacBook-Air:Downloads julene$ cd MacQuicken/
Julenes-MacBook-Air:MacQuicken julene$ scp russ@tuonela:/home/russ/Downloads/MacQuicken/Quicken_Essentials.iso .
russ@tuonela's password:
Quicken_Essentials.iso                                                             100%  150MB   5.4MB/s   00:28

Then, I used the Finder to navigate to this new ISO file and double-clicked it, producing the following effect—the ISO mounted and ready for me to install the software: