Tag: Mac

Reinstalling Snow Leopard

To satisfy my own curiosity, I reinstalled OS X Snow Leopard today.
It took about 48m to install the OS. I excluded all printer drivers, foreign language fonts, and translations.
You can’t trust the estimated time to completion. It started by reporting only 17m. After 17m, it changed to 18m, at which point I quit watching. Returning later, it reported 5m remaining, and after 1m reported completion.
One reason for a faster installation, too, is that the installation media is not verified as it was in Leopard.
This was on a 2.0GHz Core2Duo Mini.

Setting up QBZR on OS X

Bzr is nice to use. It is tailored for the masses (of which I am a member). It has the usual UNIX support, but it has first-class Windows support, too. It has a nice UI if you want it. The community is great, too.

A few days ago I installed it on OS X and found that there was no UI support via Qt. Fortunately there are directions for setting it up here. Here are the steps that I followed:

  1. Installed bzr 1.14.1
  2. Installed Qt for Mac OS X Cocoa, qt-mac-cocoa-opensource-4.5.1.dmg, to the default location
  3. Verified its installation by running ’qtdemo’
  4. Installed sip, sip-4.7.9.tar.gz
  5. Installed PyQt, PyQt-mac-gpl-4.4.4.tar.gz (build took a relatively long time)
  6. Tried out qlog and qdiff and they worked fine

Now I am wondering if I should have just installed this using MacPorts.

Addendum: 06/21/09

Here are the directions that I followed from that link: 

In order to install PyQt, you need to have SIP installed.
1) download and install QT4.x
2) get SIP from http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/sip/download.php
$> python configure.py -d /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages
$> make
$> sudo make install
3) get PyQT from http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/pyqt/download.php
$> python configure.py -q /bin/qmake -d /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages
$> make
$> sudo make install
Hope this helps to get qbzr working

BZR as of today works with Python 2.4 or greater. Leopard comes with both 2.3 and 2.5 installed; but defaults to 2.5.

I didn’t know where qmake was installed; and typing ’type -a qmake’ seemed to be the quickest way to find it.

Mini-malistic Mac development environment

It looks like the “non-pro” hardware is clearly the best place for me to start; the Mac Mini and Macbook fall into this camp.
My original thought was that the Macbook would be a perfect fit since I could hook it up to an external monitor at home and take it along with me when I need to go mobile. Then it dawned on me, I don’t really go mobile. I sure like to imagine all of the cool places I would go with it, but in reality such occurrences are few and far between. For when I really do need a mobile, I’ve go the XO and the ThinkPad, and who knows, if this Mac stuff pans out I wouldn’t mind picking up a Macbook or a MacBook pro. That said: Mini pricing seems very reasonable.
It looks like a Mini with a 2GHz CPU, maxed out with 4GB of ram, the default 120 GB hard drive, and an Nvidia video card that can drive a 1900×1200 display can be had for only $750USD. This seems more than adequate for setting up a Mac development environment; heck even Java would do fine here. What a steal!
The hard drive size upgrade prices are insane. If I need more space, I have a beautiful external LaCie hard drive that has been looking for a home!