« Home | Vonage Increases Prices » | BlackBerry Curve (8820) Fails During OS Upgrade » | How to Transfer blogs between Blogger Accounts » | Turning Your Laptop into a Universal Charger » | Happy Thanksgiving » | Leaving Credit Cards Behind » | Beware: Gift Cards for Closing Stores » | Personnel Concepts Compliance Letter Revisited » | Windows XP Display Rotated 90 Degrees » | Fail: Synching Palm with iSync and Entourage »

Reinstalling OS X from Scratch

It has been almost an entire years since I have switched to using OS X and a MacBook Pro hardware.  With the exception of the retarded one-button mouse and the lack of an CDROM eject button (what the hell were they thinking?), the experience has be overwhelmingly positive for the 8-10 hours a day that I use it. 

My only problem is that my MacBook Pro has slowly developed some odd behaviors, much like that of it's Microsoft cousins: sluggish performance and intermittent crashes thanks to a some software that failed to install correctly.  It was entirely my fault -- I tried to install an upgraded version of subversion that failed, then I added a fink installation, and tried to install an early version of KDE so I could run KDevelop natively.  I failed, and in the process soiled my system drive.

The biggest problem was that the system supplied version of the expat library was overwritten, causing apache, iChat and a number of other software packages to fail on startup.  Worse yet, after upgrading to VMWare Fusion 2, VMs would simply crash without any explanation.  It dawned on me that I might have a few problems while on the road. 

Did I really want to be carting a sick laptop around the world?  No, I didn't.

So last night I decided on the "nuclear option" -- to reinstall OS X on my Mac PowerBook (MBP) from scratch.  It took roughly two hours to install OS X.  Another hour to install the updates, Skype, Firefox, and various other utilities.  I went to bed while it was merging my iTunes library from across the network and awoke to brand new laptop.

Next, it was time to install various utilities.  Here is my basic post installation procedure:

Development Environment Tools:

  • astyle.  C/C++ code formatter.
  • doxygen.  Turns code comments into documentation, complete with call graphs.
  • GraphVis Dot.  Used by doxygen to create call graphs and charts.
  • git.  Rapidly becoming one of the better source code management platforms (subversion is installed by default).
  • Qt.  (the open source version, not the extremely expensive commercial license).
  • XCode.  Apple's IDE for C/C++/Objective-C development.
  • Eclipse.  I still don't like eclipse, but it is becoming too popular to ignore.
  • cppunit.

Utilities:

  • Gnu Privacy Guard.  Encryption and code signing software.
  • wget.  The Swiss army knife of web developers.
  • VMWare Fusion 2.  Software that allows you to run different operating systems inside virtual PCs.

Business:

  • Microsoft Office.

Communications:

  • Skype.  Proprietary VOIP and Instant messaging application
  • Yahoo Messenger.

The system runs much much faster.  

To be continued...

Labels:

Posted by Joe Turner on Wednesday, December 17, 2008 at 9:58 PM |

Hey Joe,

When did you get the MacBook Pro? I thought you had Mac Pro.

Anyway, do you still own the Mac Pro? I was thinking of getting new hardware and I am seriously considering getting Mac Pro after looking at Dell Precision Workstation and finding that Mac Pro is actually cheaper for similar hardware and build quality for Mac Pro looks much better. Also, when you bought your Mac Pro, which configuration did you buy?

Thanks for your time,
RJ

Posted by Blogger RamtaJogi | January 6, 2009 7:38 PM  

Post a Comment