If you have your own Linux web server running Apache, and if you use Mac OS X as your desktop environment, you can serve up your userdir directory with WebDAV so that you can mount it with your Finder as you would an iDisk. The following Apache 2.x configuration enables this. This is not a solution for everyone, it has a number of limitations, but if you just want to use some of your under-utilized network and disk resources this is a simple way to grab a piece of the cloud.

Mac OS X applications that are launched by the Finder (e.g., by double clicking the associated.app folder) do not see environment variable settings you make for your Unix shell, say from a Terminal window or in your .bash_profile file. For these applications you must put your settings in a property list file that Mac OS X reads when you log in. That file is ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist

Here are instructions for building and installing the PostgreSQL database server on a Mac OS X system. This includes instructions for using dscl to create a special user account to manage the database processes and data, and a sample launchd script to automatically launch the database server on system startup.

Here is what I did to my Mac OS X 10.4 environment to work with DocBook XML.