I am planning to purchase a new laptop and one of the options i am considering is to buy an Apple to avoid the hassle of installing and configuring Linux on a PC.

I would like to use a simple window manager (preferably mwm, fvwm would be an alternative) over a normal UNIX. So these are the questions I'd like to ask:

*) is such a szenario possible? I know i could do it with Linux, but not without some really nasty fiddling with the installation programs as i do NOT want any of the fancy KDE, GNOME or whatever-desktop solutions, just a plain windowmanager and nothing else. Can i deinstall/disable the Mac desktop and just use a windowmanager?

*) even if not using a desktop software will i still be able to use features like suspend-to-disk?

*) can i enable/disable this desktop preference on a per-user-basis?

*) is it possible to replace this ridiculous 1-button-mouse by a standard X-Windows-mouse with 3 buttons?

Many thanks for helping a PC-illiterate AIX admin out.

bakunin

You would be better off either using the provided Apple GUI, or getting that PC laptop and installing some flavor of Unix on it. Trying to disable the Apple GUI to run another window manager on the Mac would be just as difficult. It is not supported by Apple, either.

If you really want the Apple hardware, you could partition the Mac's drive and install multiple OS's on the machine. Support for various hardware functionality would depend on the particular OS + drivers that you install.

The only one button anything that Apple ships now is the trackpad button. Multiple button functionality is supported through using two fingers on the trackpad surface while clicking.

my 2 cents.

Regarding the one-button mouse:

If you hold command (or is it ctrl? I'm not on my Mac right now), and then click, that's the same as a 'right click'.

Also, you can plug in a standard 2 button mouse, and the Mac OS automatically supports right clicks. There is even a control panel option to disable the trackpad when a mouse is attached, and to swap the right/left button functions.

As far as a three button mouse goes... I never tried it.

Many thanks for your valuable input. It looks like i have to go with a Linux solution. Thats bad - i really appreciated the long battery times of the Mac notebooks.

bakunin

It is possible with X11 to do so, but I am not sure why you would. Aqua already runs very fast and fluid.

As I understand it, and Apple is its own breed of Unix, lauchd is the 1 launch daemon that rules everything. In the event of the system sleeping all processes are brought down by launchd as needed and only ones that are required to run, actually run, then launchd will bring back whatever else needs to, and it caches all this stuff to the hard disk. While, I don't completely 100% understand the differences, I believe OS X already does this natively and by default.

I am sure you can, but I think by default all user accounts have this feature built in.

I have always hated the cyclopitc apple mouse to the bone. i have always used third party USB mice on my laptops until I get my current Macbook Pro. It uses multi finger gestures on the mouse pad and with combination of the keyboard short cuts I barely ever need to right click anymore, and if you hate that, you can just plug in any third party USB mouse and it should work. I have never ran across a mouse that didn't work. If you get one of those fancy 50 button mice it may not work 100%, but if you check for driver support first that should answer your question.