I bought a Mac - now what?
 

My first Mac! Actually its for my wife. I'm in charge of loading it up with the necessary software. I've loaded Firefox for browsing, Wine for running a few favorite Windows card games.

1) Anyone have any positive or negative experience with OpenOffice on the Mac? It requires X11 to install - so apparently it won't behave quite like other Mac apps?

2) Any recommendations for must-have software?

3) If I install GMP-ECM is there a way to run it only when on AC power?

Not sure which type of mac (Intel or PowerPC)?

But instead of OpenOffice.org you could try NeoOffice, it's OO.org but them macced ;)
[url]http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php[/url]

Note that there is currently a problem with Mac OS X 10.4.8 on the Intel platform when you are running PowerPC based applications through the Rosetta ( [url]http://www.apple.com/rosetta/[/url] ) interface. Some math functions are returning wrong round-offs. A temporary patch is available on [url]http://www.4d.com/1048fix.html[/url] if you want to run Mac OS X 10.4.8 .

[QUOTE=Prime95;90383]My first Mac! Actually its for my wife. I'm in charge of loading it up with the necessary software. I've loaded Firefox for browsing, Wine for running a few favorite Windows card games.

1) Anyone have any positive or negative experience with OpenOffice on the Mac? It requires X11 to install - so apparently it won't behave quite like other Mac apps?

2) Any recommendations for must-have software?

3) If I install GMP-ECM is there a way to run it only when on AC power?[/QUOTE]

If you have an Intel Mac, get Parallels Desktop for the Mac. This way you can run Windows from within OS X without having to reboot.

Now you can install Xcode and build an OS X GUI for Prime95 ;-).

[QUOTE=rogue;90395]If you have an Intel Mac, get Parallels Desktop for the Mac. This way you can run Windows from within OS X without having to reboot.[/quote]

I have an Intel Mac - the new Core 2 Duo laptop. I'm trying Wine instead of Parallels so that I don't have a full Windows install on the disk - complete with its virus and incessant updates problems.

[quote]Now you can install Xcode and build an OS X GUI for Prime95 ;-).[/QUOTE]

Only if I can pry the thing out of my wife's fingers.

[QUOTE=Prime95;90408]Only if I can pry the thing out of my wife's fingers.[/QUOTE]

There WILL be some time when she is out for shopping, and then you will have time to install Prime95. ;)

[QUOTE=rogue;90395]Now you can install Xcode and build an OS X GUI for Prime95 ;-).[/QUOTE]

Bad news. There isn't an objcopy available to convert all the FFT assembly code to Mach-O object file format.

[QUOTE=Prime95;90498]Bad news. There isn't an objcopy available to convert all the FFT assembly code to Mach-O object file format.[/QUOTE]

Does this help?

[url]http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter4/efiprogramming/[/url]

[url]http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeveloperTools/Conceptual/MachORuntime/index.html[/url]

George,

Although Apple doesn't seem to ship binutils anymore (apparently they did, by looking at old threads on assorted mailing lists found by Google). However,[URL="http://www.macports.org"]DarwinPorts[/URL] has it, although I haven't tried installing binutils from it yet. You could of course build your own binutils by downloading the source -- I tried that with the latest version and was met with an error (a missing symbol of some sort), which I didn't even try to fix, though it's probably a trivial error. Building binutils via DarwinPorts should be easier anyway. A cursory glance at bfd/config.bfd shows that Mach-O targets are supported in the form of mach-o-be and mach-o-le. So if you're feeling adventurous, you could try building your own version of objcopy which supports the formats you need.

An alternative would be to assemble the file using MASM under Windows, then disassemble it to a format supported in Mac OS X (say NASM or gas) and reassemble it there -- unless this creates linking problems.

I'd very much appreciate a binary for Mac OS X. I just got a new memory module for my MacBook Pro and wanted to stress test it using Prime95, but was disappointed to learn there was no version for OS X. I tried downloading the source and porting it myself before finding this thread, but got stuck in the same place as you did.

Update: found [URL="http://www.devoresoftware.com/nomyso/"]this[/URL] Perl script which does a lot of the manual work of converting a MASM file to NASM. Along with the following sed script and a small amount of hand editing, I was able to remove most of the syntax errors:

sed -e 's/st(\([0-7]\))/st\1/g' -e 's/0\.0\.0/0.0/g'

Now what's left is to translate the leftover MASM directives that the Perl script couldn't convert. Now that's a lot of work for something that would have to be redone every time you edited the original file, but I guess if you're looking to move forward to (ahem) a more modern development environment, it might be worthwhile to invest the initial effort to convert the files to NASM, and drop MASM from your toolchain.

Hope that helps.

One word - glucas. :smile: