Software

Mac OS X operating system
Office, Email, Web
Symantec AntiVirus
Fetch (SFTP vs FTP)
EndNote
Adobe Software (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Acrobat...)
Scientific Computing
Administrative Computing

Mac OS X software.
Lehigh does not have a site license for the Mac OS X operating system. Therefore, if you wish to upgrade the version of Mac OS X that came with your Mac, you'll need to purchase a boxed retail copy or a software license. Individuals and departments may purchase Mac OS X online at a discounted education price by using Lehigh's Custom Apple Store. Individuals may purchase a "Family Pack" pack for use on up to 5 Macs at home (but not University-owned Macs.) Departments may take advantage of quantity discounts through Apple's volume licensing program (minimum 10.)

Office, Email, Web
The major functions for which most people rely on their computers on a daily basis - word processing, email, the web - are bascially the same on Macs as on PCs. The suite of commonly-used software applications that are available is correspondingly similar:

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac OS X includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage (similar to Outlook on Windows.) Lehigh's Microsoft Campus Agreement licenses this product for use by Lehigh students, faculty and staff. Students may download the installer from the Microsoft Student Software page. Faculty and Staff who wish to install Office on a personally-owned computer may purchase a CD for $10 at the Bookstore after completing a Microsoft Work-at-Home Acceptance Form. Faculty and Staff who would like Microsoft Office installed on a University-owned Mac may contact their Computing Consultant to request installation.

The Lehigh campus has standardized on the Thunderbird email client application, which is available for free from mozilla.com. Functionality is almost identical between Windows and Mac versions of Thunderbird. A version of Thunderbird that has been preconfigured with Lehigh settings is available here (20.6MB disk image). Information about how to manually configure Thunderbird for Lehigh's IMAP mail service is located on the Help Desk page, Setup and Customizing Email Using Mozilla Thunderbird.

Apple's Mail.app, included in Mac OS X, and Microsoft Entourage, part of Office 2008, can also be configured for Lehigh's IMAP mail service, although there are fewer people on campus who have familiarity with these.

Safari and Firefox are the preferred web browsers for Mac OS X. Internet Explorer should not be used, at is it no longer being developed or supported by Microsoft. Apple's Safari is included in Mac OS X. Firefox may be downloaded for free from mozilla.com. Using these two browsers, Mac OS X should be able to properly render 99% of all web pages. Personal preference will likely dictate which browser becomes your primary tool. However, if you subscribe to Apple's MobileMe service, Safari provides one advantage in that Bookmarks/Favorites can be synchronized between multiple Macs using the service.

Symantec AntiVirus
Anti-Virus protection software for PCs and Macs at Lehigh is provided through a license agreement with Symantec. How succeptible Mac OS X may be to viruses is open for debate. However, since there have been almost no Mac OS X viruses "in the wild" for many years, compared to hundreds of thousands that have appeared for Windows, installing Symantec AntiVirus (SAV) on Mac OS X is basically a 'good samaritan' decision, preventing further spread of Windows viruses that otherwise have no impact on Mac OS X itself. This benefit should be weighed against the performance degradation and possible system instabilities that may arise from installing SAV for Mac OS X. No recommendation is made either way, but the software is available for download from Lehigh's Security Page. An article in the March 18, 2008 edition of the online Mac newsletter TidBITS provides an especially thorough analysis of the question "Should Mac Users Run Antivirus Software?"

Fetch (SFTP vs FTP)
FTP is an insecure protocol that is no longer used at Lehigh. Fetch 5.1 is a familiar file transfer application that can provide secure file transfer using the SSH protocol (SFTP). Lehigh has a site license for this software, and it is available on Lehigh's Security page.

EndNote
Lehigh has purchased a limited number of network licenses of EndNote for Mac OS X, for use by faculty and staff on Lehigh-owned Macs. A customized version of EndNote must be installed to utilize these licenses. Please contact your LTS Computing Consultant to request installation. [This software is also available on the EWFM public site iMacs.]

Adobe Software (Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat)
Lehigh has purchased a limited number of network licenses for the above commonly-used Mac OS X applications, available for use on LTS site Macs only. Adobe software for use on departmental Macs or on personally-owned Macs requires purchasing individual licenses. Academic pricing is available from sites such as JourneyEd and Academic Superstore. Contact the Software Librarian for details.

It should be noted that Adobe Acrobat is not required for simple PDF creation, which is already a feature of Mac OS X. To create PDFs in Mac OS X, use the standard Print dialogue and choose "Save as PDF". Creation of complex PDF documents, however, such as those with forms, special formats or embedded interactivity, requires the full Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Scientific Computing
Mac OS X has an open-source, UNIX-based foundation called Darwin based on FreeBSD 5.0 and the Mac 3.0 microkernel. As such, Mac OS X is arguably the most widely deployed UNIX platform. In Apple's words, "Mac OS X is a super-modern operating system that combines the power and stability of UNIX with the legendary elegance of the Macintosh." While many Mac users will have no need to "venture under the hood", the primary interface for doing so is the Terminal application.

For many Mac users, however, the command line in Terminal isn't very friendly. Thankfully, Mac OS X supports the X Window System, more commonly referred to as X11, which offers the ability to run thousands of UNIX-based graphical applications concurrently with other Mac OS X applications. Apple's X11 software, native to Mac OS X and based on the de-facto standard open source X.org Foundation releases, is installed by default in Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard". See Apple's X11 web site for more detailed information.

To run X11 applications on remote computers at Lehigh, such as leaf.cc.lehigh.edu, you will typically enter the following command in the xterm window in X11 for Mac OS X:

ssh -Y yourid@leaf.cc.lehigh.edu (-Y means trusted X11 forwarding required)

Details about various scientific computing applications that are available at Lehigh can be found on Lehigh's High Performance Computing web site.

The primary resource for downloading and installing free Open Source (FOSS) UNIX software that has been ported to Mac OS X is the Fink project. Fink provides UNIX tools for binary package management. You can choose whether you want to download precompiled binary packages or build everything from source. Details are beyond the scope of this web site. For more information please see fink.sourceforge.net.

Administrative Computing (Banner, Desktop Finance, Access Databases)
With the advent of Banner Web (Internet Native Banner), Mac OS X clients are able to access Banner using the Safari web browser and the Mac link on this page http://www.lehigh.edu/lewis/. We've found that most most of the administrative computing needs of Mac users are satisfied through this access method. If you require the Oracle Client and Reports Runtime or use of an Access Database, however, these are functions that must be accomplished in Windows XP. Please see the following section "Windows on Mac" for further exploration of these options.