Prior to 10.5, all you needed to
do to install a Mac program was drag it to wherever you wanted it – the
program was self-contained. Nowadays, that’s not true – they require
installation procedures and put hooks in several places on the system
just like a Windows program, and you need to use OTHER programs (like pacifist) to control aspects of the install.

I’m sorry that I used unclear
terminology (by not specifying that OSX does not use a registry hive
that is exactly like Windows) but the process is largely the same now. I hope this clarifies what I was meaning.

Uh, there is no registry in Mac OS X. In addition, you can install a program anywhere you want. If you are using an installer it will install it to the “Applications” folder by default usually, but you can then move it. If you use a program like Pacifist you can get even more control over the installation process.

“Console” is a nice widows console replacement I recommend. I only very rarely used it, since I’m a long time user of Take Command (http://jpsoft.com/)*. But Console is free and Take Command is not (http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/)

“Servers Alive” for you all servers monitoring and alerting. I find it excellent since I never required more than 10 entries and that’s what the free version offers with all the features of the enterprise version. (http://www.woodstone.nu/salive/editions.php)

—
* I’m a big fan of Take Command. But there’s a snag. The version I use is 7.01 from… 2005(!). That’s right. After that the program took a turn I didn’t like and I never updated after that. So I can’t really recomend Take Command as I don’t like the new versions. It was great back in 2005, though. And that’s what I have.

Calculating checksums on Linux is trivial,k because of the way we normally operate with it. But on Windows, having a separate application to calculate checksums isn’t very elegant or practical.

HashTab and HashCheck deal with this nicely. They are both shell extensions that add a new tab to the file properties window which will allow you to calculate and compare checksums. (you can pick which one you like best, or just add both)

Snapshots:
HashTab: http://i.imgur.com/2RrnY.jpg
HashCheck:http://i.imgur.com/iRdga.jpg

Links:
HashTab: http://www.implbits.com/HashTab/HashTabWindows.aspx
HashCheck: http://code.kliu.org/hashcheck/

I confess I never got into the virtual desktop mood. On Linux especially I don’t run traditional DEs and have always preferred instead tiling WMs (i3 being my favorite pretty much since it appeared). So, I just developed my habits around a single desktop + multiple monitors configuration and can’t see me getting out of it.

Didn’t know about Wagic. Thanks! :)

As for Wireshark, one note to anyone interested: If you are connecting to your ISP through a USB pen modem, chances are it won’t be detected by Wireshark. I haven’t gone yet through Wireshark settings in a lot of detail. Basically I don’t need it too much at this time. But from what I have experienced so far, it’s very likely these modem will only work on Enhanced Wireshark version.

That’s exactly it, I’m afraid – Linux has had these things since long before XP’s powertoys were released, and sadly the only flirt that Windows made with it was in powertoys, never to see the light of day as part of the OS itself. In reality, that’s a big part of why I wrote this article – there’s no reason NOT to have the features, it’s not like the OS can’t support it…it just needs extended!

Remember TweakUI? I couldn’t install Windows without grabbing that (came with the Powertoys, but was also stand-alone).