Following our post on how Hubble users’ operating system choices have evolved with time…

Here’s a summary of the operating systems used to access AstroBetter since May 2011:

Grabbed from Google Analytics.

Our readers are considerably Mackier and less Linuxy than I would have thought. Comments? And Kelle points out the small-but-growing fraction of y’all that are squinting at AstroBetter on your handheld device.

]]> http://www.astrobetter.com/astrobetter-operating-systems/feed/ 1 http://www.astrobetter.com/os-apt-astronomers/ http://www.astrobetter.com/os-apt-astronomers/#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:00:50 +0000 Jane Rigby http://www.astrobetter.com/?p=5289

Previously on AstroBetter, we’ve discussed what operating systems are used in our profession, in particular relative numbers of OS X (Mac) versus Linux users. While it’s good for us at AstroBetter to know our readership, we can use Google Analytics for that. It’s more important for the astronomical community to know the broader landscape, so that as astronomers develop software tools, they are aware of the platforms colleagues will use to access those tools.

So I asked the folks at STScI who run the Astronomer’s Proposal Tool (APT).  They’ve been keeping track of what operating system was used to submit every Hubble proposal for the last 7 proposal cycles.  They kindly sent me a chart to share.  Here it is,

Mac OS X Lion has been released and can be downloaded and installed on existing Snow Leopard machines. I have a Mac laptop for communication, travel, etc. and a Mac desktop which is my primary data reduction/analysis machine. I have chosen to upgrade my laptop immediately and test some of the software I use everyday before upgrading my workhorse desktop. Below, I will describe my installation experience and the software I have tested so far. I will periodically update the post and add comments over the next few weeks.

Why did I upgrade?

I chose to upgrade immediately to OS X Lion because there are several features that I want, most particularly iCloud syncing of Calendar, Contacts, etc. Also, I want to rapidly upgrade my workhorse desktops because Lion supports multi-user login with each user having separate graphical interfaces. There is a very thorough review over at Ars Technica, shorter summary at Engadget, and an installation guide at MacWorld. We had a preview post earlier with some of our favorite features as well.

Installation

I downloaded OS X Lion through the Mac App Store, which took 1.5 hours on a fast ethernet connection. The installation process itself took about 15 minutes and I had no immediate problems. Below are some of the differences that I noticed having used OS X Lion for less than 2 hours now:

• I previously had 4 Spaces (individual desktops), which disappeared after the upgrade. I re-created them by opening Mission Control (three-finger swipe-up) and scrolling to the upper right corner. A plus sign appears and you can add desktops.
• The first app I opened was Mail trying to connect to an IMAP account. It prompted me for my password continuously; but I keep getting an error message saying my password is invalid. This is an issue with Mac Mail and they are apparently aware of it (only receiving email is an issue, sending is fine). This is turning into a very big issue, so hopefully Apple will get on top of it quickly.
• The look and feel of Mail is different with a more iPad look-and-feel. You can go back to “Classic View” in the preferences. 
• The second app I opened was Safari. Scrolling is different in Lion and scroll bars don’t appear by default. I immediately changed preferences to always show scroll bars (System Preferences -> General). I have left scrolling behavior at the defaults for now as it is more iOS like. I switched my scrolling behavior in less than 5 minutes without even thinking about it. But other people may want to adjust preferences to their liking.
• Old PPC applications that rely on Rosetta don’t work (e.g. MS Office 2004)
• Other applications that I have tried without issues:
  • Calendar
  • Address Book
  • python, scisoft, matplotlib (already installed in Snow Leopard)
  • DevonThink
  • Emacs (Carbon)
  • Terminal
  • Papers (version 2)
  • X11

Feel free to comment below on your experience installing OS X Lion and particular apps you have or have not had trouble with after upgrading. So far, things are looking good and I am eagerly waiting iCloud syncing, which may be available in late September.

I’m a big keyboard shortcut kinda gal. In both X11 and Aqua apps like Mailplane, TextMate, and Firefox, I regularly use:

ctrl-k to “kill” an entire line
ctrl-y to “yank” it back
ctrl-a to move to the beginning of a line
ctrl-e to move to the end of a line.

I’ve been in the market for a way to move back by word for awhile. And this Lifehacker article, The Mac OS X Delete Key: It Goes Both Ways, has gotten me a step in the right direction:

fn-delelte to delete text in front of the cursor
option+delete to delete entire word behind cursor. (In X11, entire line.)
cmd-delete to delete entire line of text behind cursor.

I could see these shortcuts being really useful! One snag is that the behavior doesn’t seem to be consistent between X11 and regular Aqua apps.

But, this still doesn’t help me just move back a word. So, does anybody know how to do move back by word in either X11 or Aqua? What are other keyboard shortcuts that you use while working with lines of text? Maybe it’s buried in the official list, Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts, but I don’t see it!

In the Linux environment we have the terminal program that comes packed with loads of features. For example, if you were in /home/name/to/directory and created a tab, that new tab would be in the same directory. Most Linux users would say “so what?” OSX’s terminal does not have that capability and can be quite tedious when you’re consistently going to a specific directory for each new tab. There have been attempts to making a better terminal for OSX, such as iTerm, but it always fell out of favor as OSX’s native terminal application works well and is nicely integrated with the operating system.

A new terminal application for OSX has been released, called iTerm2, ”a replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm“. The difference between iTerm and iTerm2 is impressive. Some of the features that caught my eye are searching, full screen, split screens, a native expose, and step-back-in-time.

The searching capability is useful as you can search the terminal easily where the search terms are highlighted. Split screens in iTerm2 works very well, but is unique in this case as you can do expose on the split screens along with tabs and other terminal windows. Additionally, you can search all the terminal windows/tabs/split-screens at once.

Search feature

Three split screens

The step-back-in-time feature is the first I have seen with any terminal program/application. It allows you to take a terminal window (or tab) back in time such that you can resume a specific state that you were working on before. This can be very handy.

Step back in time

 

The native expose feature in iTerm2 allows the user to view all the open tabs and windows in one view. You can search all of the windows and tabs simultaneously.

iTerm2 native expose

 

If you like eye candy, then you will be happy that iTerm2 offers transparency while blurring out what is behind the terminal. If you want to see all the features that iTerm2 offers go visit their features page, where you will find Growl support, autocomplete and other useful capabilities.

The only bug that I have found with the iTerm2 is when you use OS X’s expose. For some reason the iTerm2 windows become invisible (besides its shadow). Other than that, it’s a very highly recommended terminal application if you’re looking for something that has productive features.

Marcos talked about the Mac App Store and the advantages it brings to Mac users.  While I was (and am) excited about the App Store and the numerous applications I now have easy access to, my one big fear is coming true: previously-free applications now need to be paid for. With the App Store handling the marketing and payments, it becomes a lot more convenient for individual developers to stop offering their wares as open source projects; and we end up losing or paying for a lot of the applications that we used to just download.  Now, Apple itself has started this trend with the release of XCode 4 which is now available for $4.99 via the App Store (unless you have already paid $99/yr for the iOS/Mac Developer’s package in which case XCode 4 is free); it used to be previously available after a free registration. While $4.99 is a pittance and and a not-so-recent version might still come bundled with a new Mac, it continues the Apple’s recent tendency to nickel-and-dime its customers and follows in the wake of not shipping the Apple Remote ($19.99) and the DVI/VGA adapters ($29.99) with the Apple laptops. Don’t get me wrong, $4.99 is a very, very low price for what XCode offers; for comparison, BBEdit, a high-performance HTML and text editor—and an excellent one but one that come without XCode’s libraries, tools, and utilities—goes for $99.99! What gets me is Apple’s need to wheedle an extra $4.99 out of its customers who have already paid a large premium for the computers.

So what does this mean for most astronomers who use emacs, vi, or eclipse rather than XCode for writing/debugging their code? What Xcode brings is the suite of developer tools—including but not limited to gcc, java, jikes, and gdb—that you need to compile code from its source. Hence, if you have a *nix emulator like MacPorts or Fink installed on your Mac, they use the Developer Tools; and you are out of luck**! To be able to use open-source software, you will, ironically, need to pay Apple first. Fink can install packages as binaries, which are available only for a limited number of packages, while MacPorts exclusively builds packages from source.  If you program in C, C++, or Java—or, especially, if you use them only occasionally, XCode makes life much simpler for you.  Of course, there is always the option of installing all of the libraries manually, in which case it might be easier to get a *nix box anyways.

** [footnote added based on comments below] You are only out-of-luck if you would have liked to upgrade to XCode 4 or future versions of the OS don’t ship with XCode. Your current install of Macports/Fink/Homebrew will be unaffected; and, for now, Apple still has Xcode 3 available for free.

Apple just seeded the developer’s preview for Mac OS 10.7 Lion and released more details about what Lion is going to bring. As OS 10.6 Snow Leopard was more of a cosmetic improvement, it has been a while since we got a “new” OS. Here are five reasons why I am really excited about OS 10.7 Lion:

1) Versions: Building on a similar concept as Time Machine, Lion will track the history of changes that you make to your document sparing you from storing multiple copies of the document. In other words, Versions is (probably) primed to replace git, svn, and Mercurial from our lives. While git/Mercurial will still have the advantage of allowing for checking out documents to multiple users, it might just be easier to use Versions for most single-author projects. With a free MobileMe (see below), you will also be to push the newest versions of your document to an online server for safe storage.

Many of our laptops containing sensitive information — proprietary proposals, student grades, a secret plan to take over the world through speckle interferometry.  We all know the security risk of stolen laptops and thumb drives.  But many of us don’t want to encrypt our entire home directory.

Here’s an easy way to encrypt just the data you want encrypted.  You create an encrypted, password-protected disk image, and then drag your sensitive files inside.  To work with the files, double-click the disk image and enter the password.  To re-encrypt them, just “eject” the disk image.

You can also use this technique to encrypt a USB thumb drive — just choose a disk image filesize that fills the thumb drive.

Update:  If you’re using OS X 10.5 and don’t care about back-compatibility, select the “Sparse Bundle” disk image.  This allows the encrypted disk to grow in size.

The new Mac App Store debuted a few weeks ago as Apple’s new centralized location for finding, purchasing, and installing Macintosh applications. (Don’t forget, we have a centralized list of useful Mac apps on the AstroBetter wiki.) It is modeled on the very successful iOS App Store, and works as its own, new, application that is part of the Snow Leopard 10.6.6 system update that rolled out on January 6. Apple reported they had 1 million downloads the first day.

For the tech savviest of Astrobetter readers, there isn’t much new on the App Store. Still, adding new applications to a Mac stands in stark contrast to the simplicity of installing apps on an iPhone or other iOS device. Indeed, the options for distributing Mac applications are diverse and sometimes confusing (Distributing as a disk images is particularly confusing. An “image” of a disk as a file is very abstract for a novice user.)

As we look forward to the days of Mac OS 10.7 Lion (Summer 2011) and a flood of hints on how to take advantage of new features in Lion at Mac OS X Hints, I thought it would be a good idea to share the list (from my bookmarks) of my favorite hints  since 10.6 Snow Leopard came out in August 2009. Since Snow Leopard was the first major OS X release that was not a core change in the OS over 10.5 Leopard, most of the hints for 10.5 should still apply; so this is not an exhaustive list. Also, I would like to add that this selection is biased by my computing practices and when I read the hint.

How to assign X11 to a Space

Add wireless networks from command line

Using Quick Look from the Command Line

Execute small bits from the clipboard in Terminal