wget is an incredibly useful GNU tool on Linux. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come with OS X (as of Mountain Lion). OS X includes curl, which is a very handy tool but lacks at least one important feature of wget: the ability to use wildcards to get multiple files at the same time. For example, let’s say you want download all the example files from the IGES specification. With wget, you could type:

wget http://www.wiz-worx.com/iges5x/wysiwyg/igs/*.igs

Here is how to mimic that process with curl and a few UNIX command-line tricks.
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The following kernel configuration was posted by Alessandro Di Marco as a comment on a previous post in which I provided a Linux kernel config for an earlier version of the kernel. In the interest of sharing his contribution, I’m placing it in its own post. I don’t know the author personally and I have not tried this config.  Like any other free software, you are using it at your own risk and neither Alessandro nor I provide any warranty. Download the file from the link below, change the file extension from .txt. to .config and load the config into one of the standard kernel configuration tools (such as make menuconfig) and look over all the options before using it.

Gentoo Kernel 3.1 Config

Here is an xorg.conf for a Gentoo guest running in VMWare Fusion on MacOS 10.6 (Snow Leopard).  It’s surprisingly simple to set up X when the hardware is fake  Gentoo runs great on a Macbook Pro 13″.  I was concerned at first about the lack of 3D acceleration, but I tried a few 3D applications and found the performance to be acceptable.  Blender ran really smoothly with a simple model (once I found out that command-click is equivalent to middle click).  Rotating a field of several hundred spheres in Paraview was a little slow, but still very acceptable.

I also bought a Logitech wireless mouse, and found that the middle button works just as you’d expect (paste) in Gentoo running in Fusion.  I didn’t have to install the Logitech drivers in OS X.

I recently installed Gentoo Linux (amd64) as a guest on my Mac (OS 10.6 Snow Leopard) using VMWare Fusion.  I thought I’d post the kernel config that I am using, since I didn’t find any out there that I trusted.  If you can use this as a starting point, then it should save you some time and trouble.  It’s a pretty minimal configuration–I think I removed all the extra drivers and stuff.  You could lean it out a little more by removing the audio and a few other extras that I thought I might use.  Let me know if you have any trouble with it.

Gentoo amd64 kernel config for VMWare Fusion

So far I am very pleased with its performance.  My only disappointment is that VMWare doesn’t support Linux graphics hardware acceleration.