1. Renaming Files: Select the file with your left mouse & hit enter.
2. Name: Pick a name for the computer. The name must belong to a solar system object and also have an unambiguous spelling. Send an email to Maryann Fitzpatrick asking for a static IP associated with that name.
3. Secondary Button: Follow Apple Logo>System Preferences>Hardware>Keyboard & Mouse. Change the right hand side of the mouse graphic to Secondary Button. This lets you right-click on things.
4. Update: Start by updating the installed software. Start out by updating the default Apple software. To do this, follow Apple Logo>System Preferences>System>Software Updates. Select Check Now and let the system update itself.
5. Terminal & Activity Monitor: Next we add the Terminal and Activity Monitor to the Dock since we'll be using them all the time.. To do this,follow Go>Utilities from the menue bar on the top. Drag and drop the Terminal & Activity Monitors to your Dock. You'll run your code through the Terminal just as you would on a Linux machine. The Activity Monitor lets you monitor your CPU usage and decide if your code is still running.
6. Spaces & Expose: Follow Apple Logo>System Preferences>Personal>Expose & Spaces and check Enable Spaces & Show Spaces in menue bar. Make sure that you have atleast four virtual desktops set up. Set To activate Spaces to the F8 key, set To switch between spaces to the Command+Arrow Keys. Uncheck When switching to an application, switch to a space with open windows for the application. Now lets set up the Expose tab. I have Active Screen Corners set to Application Windows in the bottom left & Spaces in the bottom right.
7. Energy Saver: Setup Energy Saver from Apple Logo>System Preferences>Hardware>Energy Saver. I use the following settings
   1. Computer sleep: Never
   2. Display Sleep: 1 Hour
8. Print & Fax: Setup Print & Fax from Apple Logo>System Preferences>Hardware>Print & Fax. To add printers, click on the + symbol and under Protocol select Internet Printing Protocol - IPP. Add the following two printers in the Address field. Set netprinter2 to be the default printer by right clicking on netprinter2 and selecting Set default printer.
   1. netprinter2.physics.drexel.edu
   2. astrocolor.physics.drexel.edu
9. Firefox: Install the latest version of Firefox. Most OS X program files ship in the form of installers that carry a .dmg extension. To install such an application, one simply double clicks on the .dmg file and follows the install procedure through. Some programs ship in the form of tarballed and compressed archives with an executable inside. Such applications may be installed by simply dragging & dropping the executable inside to Go>Applications.
10. System Settings: Apple hides various system settings & files (. files) to protect OS X users from themselves. This can be fairly inconvenient at times. Install the Secrets panel to be able to edit these settings at will.
11. Office 2008: Install & update Office 2008.
12. Acrobat Pro 9: Install & update Adobe Acrobat Pro 9.10. To get Acrobat Pro, ask your advisor to log into the Drexel Software server wiith his credentials and look in /facultyandstaff/Macintoshsoftware/.
13. iWork '09: Install & update iWork '09. iWork '09 is an office suite made by Apple. It is felt by the author of this webpage that it is ergonomically superior to Office 2008 and hence is recommended for mundane tasks such as drafting abstracts and posters.You may obtain the iWorks '09 install disk from Dr.G. Richards. Remember that iWorks is not as popular as Office and so all documents that require portability should be saved as both iWorks files & Office compatible files.
14. Misc Calculations: Install Maple 12 and/or MathLab 2008.
15. XCode: Download and install the latest build of XCode. XCode is Apple's software development environment for OS X and is required for some of the other programs that we'll install later.
16. XQuartz: Download and install XQuartz. XQuartz is an open source X11 emulator that lets you run Linux applications such as Gimp on OS X.
17. MacPorts: Install & update MacPorts. MacPorts is an open source project to let you compile, install, & upgrade either command line, X11, or Aqua based software. To search for GPL software, you type port search application-name into a terminal window. To install the application, you type in sudo port install application-name into the terminal.
18. Papers: Go get Papers. Papers is an OS X program that maintains your library of research papers. You can use it to search for papers by various fields such as authors, date etc... in various databases such as ArXiV, ADS etc.... Email the developers for a student discount and then ask your advisor to buy you a license using the discount.
19. Aquaemacs: Install Aquaemacs an Emacs-like text editor for the Aqua environment. You may change your .profile file to alias Aquamacs to emacs and take the analogy a step further. To do so, add to the following lines to your .profile file: alias aquaemacs="open -a 'Aquamacs Emacs'". This allows you to open an ASCII text file for editing in Aquamacs Emacs by simply typing emacs filename.
20. LaTex: Install either MacTex and/or TexShop. These two little programs allow you to write and compile LaTex documents. LaTex is a typesetting language that every physicist and mathematician should know and love.
21. Fortran: Install Fortran '95. To do this, search for g95 using MacPorts and install the latest stable build. Lots of astronomy code is written in Fortran, so you may as well get used to programming in it.
22. Numpy & IRAF: Go get SciSoft. SciSoft includes additional NumPy modules that aren't included on your Mac be default. It also includes IRAF, which you'll find yourself using a lot if you do any kind of observational astronomy. You can read about how to use IRAF in the excellent book An Introduction to Astronomical Photometry Using CCDs by W. Romanishin. Printed copies may be found on the shelves in 808 or with other graduate students.
23. SSH: OS X comes with SSH built in so you don't have to do anything if you don't want to. However, I find using the command line for file transfers to be a pain, so go install Fugu. Fugu is an open source SSH frontend package that makes life easier by not having to remember SSH commands for transferring files.

At this point, you should have your iMac setup to be able to do most of the things that you might need to. From here on in, you're on your own.