Software

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

*Detailed information on ALL software available at Lehigh can be found on the Lehigh University Software web site.

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 Mac OS X through Apple's Mac App Store. Departments may take advantage of quantity discounts through Apple's volume licensing program (minimum 20.)

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 2011 for Mac OS X includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Lehigh's Microsoft Campus Agreement licenses this product for use by Lehigh students, faculty and staff. Students may purchase an installation DVD for $15 at the Bookstore. Faculty and Staff who wish to install Office on a personally-owned computer may purchase a DVD for $15 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. Recent versions of Thunderbird should auto-configure after you enter your Lehigh email address in setup. Additional 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 Outlook (part of Office 2011), can also be configured for Lehigh's IMAP mail service, although there are fewer people on campus who have familiarity with these.

Safari is the preferred web browsers for Mac OS X, but it is good practice to have alternate browsers installed. Firefox may be downloaded for free from mozilla.com. Google Chrome may be downloaded from gooogle.com. Personal preference will likely dictate which browser becomes your primary tool. However, if you use Apple's iCloud service, Safari provides one advantage in that Bookmarks/Favorites can be synchronized between multiple Macs using the service.

Fetch (SFTP vs FTP)
FTP is an insecure protocol that is no longer used at Lehigh. Fetch 5.7 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.

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.

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. However, if you require the Oracle Client and Reports Runtime or use of an Access Database such as Desktop Finance, these are functions that must be accomplished in Windows 7. Please see the following section "Windows on Mac" for further exploration of these options.

Scientific Computing
Mac OS X was based on 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 some Mac users, 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 10.7 "Lion". However, as of Mac OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion", Apple has dropped dedicated support fro X11.app, directing user s to the open source XQuartz project instead.

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.