Install Fun

Update A few additions I thought I’d add here rather than keep for another post. Sarat just messaged me with a link to CrossOver Mac. I now have IE 6 running natively on my mac. Which is nice. I also installed Twisted but that’s probably for later too.

I finally got round to getting myself a new MacBook (only a week or so after Phil) and a nice piece of kit it is too. I decided not to simply plug it into my previous machine via firewire and port everything across. I sort of figured something would break moving from a G4 to the new Intel machines but I think the real reason was that I quite like setting up a fresh machine. It might just be me but I quite like installing and tweaking things.

I thought, for posterity, I’d post a list of the things I installed and some of the tweaks I got up to.

First things first. I installed most of these apps into a Personal folder in the Applications folder, just to keep them separate from the preinstalled Apple applications.

As nice as the OS X interface is a couple of small additions can’t hurt. With all the talk about Spaces of late I’m not sure if people had come across Desktop Manager before. It’s basically spaces, or virtual desktops, now.

I also include a few Apple apps in my dock that I use on a regular basis:

I’m a UNIX geek at heart, from even before OS X moved in that direction, and both Fink and Darwin Ports make grabbing most packages easy enough.

Web development is what I do, and I couldn’t be doing that without a handfull of frameworks could I?

Their are lots of ways of setting up the Apache MySQL PHP stack on OS X, the OS already includes versions of Apache and PHP in fact. I instead went for using the MAMP installer to avoid the likely problems of upgrading from source the preinstalled versions. I then got to work tweaking and twisting the default MAMP install into shape, adding th ability to quickly setup virtual hosts, a central code library repository, sorting paths out and setting up Python support. I hope to post about this later on in more detail.

All in all, everything is up and running nicely.