Moving from Mac OS X to Fedora

[Apotheosis]

Hello Everyone,

This is mainly for people with OS X experience that also use Fedora which is why I am coming up dry on searching. I will try to keep this brief.

I work in an environment with a lot of iMacs, probably around 1,000 or so is a fair estimate. With the recent economic crunch, we're looking to move some of our iMacs to Linux to try and save money. At this point I'm looking more towards Fedora since they are desktop machines that will be re-imaged on an annual basis.

I feel like I know enough about Fedora to get going and be a typical end-user that just sets up users in /etc/sudoers and installs software with yum, but I would like to know about the OS and how it compares to OS X. For instance:

In OS X, every users has preferences under /shortname/Library/preferneces where things like desktop and app settings are stored. Also, things like network settings are stored in /System/Library/Preferences and every preference file is stored in a plist. What is the equivalent of this in Fedora? I like to change a few things to read only in OS X, especially things like system docks to prevent users for changing them or their size.

Also, in OS X we use launchd, where we can set user agents (launched when anyone logs in) and users daemons (launched when the system starts up [executed as root]). How would I go about executing a shell script or a basic command in Fedora where there is no launchd?

Lastly, is there anything such as Apple Remote Desktop? I tried searching, but I fear there isn't anything quite like this one. The closest thing I could find was CSSH.

There are other things such as making RPMs which appears to be the easy install and uninstall software when it doesn't exist in repositories, but I have found some documentation on that earlier and I will just need to play with it.

Anything else you think I should know about for this transition would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

[rookcifer]

I am not really familiar with OS X, so I will point you in the direction of a couple of links that might help explain the Linux directory naming conventions.

This article explains the directory naming. Basically all system wide configuration files are in /etc. All user specific configuration files are in /home/username. User specific start-up scripts are also stored in /home/username as hidden "dot" files (files preceded by a period). Likewise, all user specific program configurations are also done in this directory (.kde, .gnome, .mplayer, .mozilla, etc.).

This article gives background on traditional Unix (and Linux) conventions insofar as startup, shutdown and other automated scripts are concerned. It compares this traditional Unix way with what OS X does with launchd. Basically, Apple totally rewrote the way it's done and it differs a lot from the traditional Unix way. Basically, Linux still relies on /etc/rc.d, cron jobs and inetd or xinetd.

[mohaas05]

Apple Remote Desktop is basically VNC. Fedora has a built in VNC host, and comes with the Tiger VNC client.

[scottro]

Ah yes, and that's a problem. Tiger vnc's viewer doesn't work with Macs. It sort of works if you play with the setting for mouse cursor, but in its default, it doesn't give you a mouse. Actually, it might react to clicks, but you're dealing with an invisible mouse. The bug is apparently upstream, as I can duplicate it when building from source, and is filed on bugzilla, though I don't think the maintainer has gotten to it--and again, it's an upstream issue, so don't know what the maintainer can do.


The tigervnc server is quite good though, seemingly (to me) as fast as freenx or the commercial NX.

What I do is build an rpm for tightvnc and use that for the viewer.