Well, I finally found out what happens when OS X really crashes. I was running Absoft’s Disk Warrior, to do something like regular maintenance on my hard disk drive. I put the CD in, booted to it, ran Disk Warrior on my disk, and went to sleep while it chugged away. I woke up to see this. There aren’t many OSes that I haven’t eventually crashed; and those are generally because I haven’t spent much time on it.

So, I rebooted, started the disk check again. This time it went without a problem, and I’m obviously writing this entry on my Mac.

I have to say, I’m quite pleased with the direction the Mac OS has taken since Apple assimilated NeXT. I absolutely hated the ‘classic’ Macintosh OSen. I only decided to give Apple a try when they released a real operating system.

Still, I’m getting used to the quirks of a Mac. My only real gripe is the behavior of the ‘Home’ and ‘End’ keys: I’m used to the way it acts on Windows, DOS, and every flavor of Unix I’ve ever used. There is a ‘sorta’ fix that lets me use them like I’m used to for Cocoa apps. Still SOL for Carbon apps, though.

Considering I use Linux at work (Gentoo on my desktop, but the wonders of X11 means I can connect transparently to the machines I actually do work on), it shouldn’t be surprising that there are aspects of OS X that seem a bit off. But I still wish font rendering in X11 was as nice as it is on the Mac.

Being a Gentoo Linux user, I’ve been using DarwinPorts to handle the software packages I’m used to seeing from Linux. But DarwinPorts isn’t all xen: The past few days upgrading usually doesn’t complete successfully, giving me some “Error: No port rcs found” message. So I just run ‘port outdated’ and manually name the packages. I hate wasting keystrokes and having to deal with broken automation.