I was having trouble getting PHP 5 fastcgi to work with lighttpd on my Mac OS X 10.4 laptop. The core of the problem is that the default port install of php5 on the mac does not include CGI support.

The command you are looking for is

sudo port install php5 +fastcgi

#use this command to see what options are available
port variants php5

I believe this is the Mac equivalent to ubuntu's command

sudo apt-get install php5-cgi

PHP 5 and LightTPD on Mac OS X

I've been having a lot of trouble figuring out how to configure general mac startup services. I've also had tons of trouble figuring out how to configure lighttpd.conf files. I came across this TextSnippets website that seems to have a lot of good examples for configuring all this crazy server and OS X related stuff.

Lighttpd launchd item for OS X 10.4

I just got used to using Ubuntu Linux over the past couple years and now we use Macs at work. The trouble is that the Mac flavor of UNIX is quite a bit different from the way Ubuntu works. I found this to be a helpful introduction to understanding the similarities and differences between Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux.

Top Ten Mac OS X Tips for Unix Geeks

Tired of pressing delete 1,000 times to move around in your terminal window? Use these handy shortcuts and spare yourself the repetitve stress inducing, carpal-tunnel-flaring effects of using the command line in Macs and Linux.

My current favorites:

• ctrl-a: move to front of line
• ctrl-e: move to end of line
• ctrl-w: delete word before cursor
• ctrl-r: search past command history
• up/down arrow: page through previous commands
• alt-b / alt-f: move backward/forward one word (without deleting)

Bash shell keyboard shortcuts

For some reason Mac OS X does not reload, restart, or re-initialize your hosts file (at least not the one at /private/etc/hosts) when you've altered it. Windows and Linux usually do.

To reload the Mac OS X hosts file, run this:

sudo niload -v -m hosts . < /etc/hosts

The author at the Holy Shmoly! blog led me to the promised land.

Detailed link