Random Stuff Stefan Tilkov’s Weblog

• Home
• About
• Blogroll
• Archives
• Feed (Atom)
• Feed (RSS 2.0)

OS X Setup

November 19, 2005

I recently setup my PowerBook from scratch again; some quick notes, basically for myself but maybe useful for others. I will update it as I add more and more stuff I had but didn’t remember to move initially.

Mac OS X Tiger installation

• Remember to select “Customize”
• Deselect printer drivers I don’t need
• The same for unnecessary languages
• Select X (it doesn’t hurt)
• Start installation
• Install Developer Tools (XCode) from Tiger install DVD
• Perform Software Update
• Reboot

After the reboot, I make some customizations:

• By default, the computer name is set to some default such as “User Name’s PowerBook G4”. The place to change this is the Sharing preference pane.

• I have no use at all for Dashboard, so I make sure it wastes no memory or CPU cycles:

  defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

  killall Dock

• I don’t care much for Spotlight, either. While I still make up my mind whether it’s going to share Dashboard’s fate, I make sure that I have one folder (in my case, it’s ~/tmp) that is neither indexed by Spotlight nor catalogued by QuickSilver.

• Change F1-F12 to control software features (in Keyboard preferences); this enables the function keys to work as you would expect them to (which means without having to press Fn. This makes sense on a notebook only.)

Applications

Next, I install my favorite applications:

• QuickSilver, the most important tool of all. Without it, I can not really use a Mac anymore. I set the Spotlight hotkey to something different and use Command-Space to invoke QuickSilver
• iTerm, my Terminal replacement of choice
• Emacs, as provided by Apple. Make sure to remove Contents/Resources/site-lisp/site-start.d/carbon-emacs-japanese-*.el unless you’re Japanese.
• MenuMeters, a menubar extension that displays essential system information; I’ve become so used to it that something feels wrong if I use a Mac without it.
• Eclipse; the version 3.2 milestones work fine for me.
• DarwinPorts has replaced Fink for me; it provides easy access to command line and other Unix tools
• ecto, the excellent blogging client I use to write this entry
• NetNewsWire, my RSS/Atom news reader
• Adium, multi-protocol IM client
• Firefox, seldomly used here, but useful to have around if pages don’t work in the browsers I usually use
• goPod, to remove the stupid EU volume limit on my iPod after each firmware update
• getTunes, to get music off other running iTunes installations on a local net
• JHymn, to remove Apple’s DRM
• Microsoft Office, to remain compatible with the rest of the world (sigh)
• Lotus Notes, although I don’t use it very often anymore (I access our Domino server via the Web or through IMAP/POP)
• MPlayer OS X, multi-format video player
• OmniDiskSweeper, to find huge and useless files
• OmniGraffle, the world’s best diagramming tool
• OmniWeb, the world’s best Web browser
• OmniOutliner, seldomly used, but comes as part of Omni’s productivity package
• RealPlayer, not sucking that much on the Mac
• TypeIt4Me, a nice way to save on keystrokes
• Skype, for being able to those who like it
• Windows Media Player, to play stuff encoded wrongly.
• Cocoalicious, a del.icio.us client
• CocoaMySQL, a database UI for MySQL

Restoring Settings

Most decent Mac OS X applications keep their settings somewhere under ~/Library/Application Support. For NetNewsWire, ecto, and Adium, copying the respective subdirectories to a new installation works perfectly; this is how I move stuff from my old installation to a new one.

Miscellaneous Packages

OS X comes with almost every command line tool you need to be productive. Via DarwinPorts, I add

• subversion
• openssh (I had some timeout problems with the ssh bundled by Apple)
• rb-rubygems (as a pre-requisite for Rails)

Other stuff

Lock screen

One of the few things I missed from Windows was the ability to lock the box via a simple key stroke. Putting

/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend

on a QuickSilver trigger does the trick.

Virtual hosts

OS X comes with Apache pre-installed, the easiest way to enable it is to switch on “Personal Web Sharing” in the Sharing preferences pane. To simplify sandboxed Web development, I use a very neat script called “virtualhost.sh” which you can get here; it essentially turns setting up a new virtual host including a host name entry into a 0.5 second affair.

MySQL

MySQL is now trivially easy to set up on OS X, since there’s a Mac installer package. If it doesn’t actually have to serve any DBs, it consumes almost no resources, so I just leave it up and running (i.e. I install the startup item and the preference pane). Changing the root password is mandatory, the easiest way I have found is:

 /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -u root
 set password for root@localhost=password('whatever');

Comments