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Transition Guide

Even though the switch to the Intel Mac was much less painful than anticipated, it's still worth documenting.

I received my MacBook Pro (2GHz, 2GB RAM) last Thursday evening. I proceeded with the setup right away, of course, and I basically was done at the end of the next day. The main problem I had was with the blog install (what else?), in particular with phpMyAdmin/mysql. Note that during the last weeks, I had slowly tried to upgrade many apps to their universal versions, to ease out the transition.

  1. USER ACCOUNT: I started trying to move my home account (and the rest) with the migration manager. This did not work. For some reason, my old powerbook would not play nicely when started in firewire target disk. The sign appears, but it is not seen from the outside. It's not completely surprising, as I know something is wrong with its network config/internal (e.g. VPN that does not work). I tried many other things (e.g. mounting the MacBook as firewire disk), but eventually did the following:
    1. Started the MacBook with no migration
    2. Created a main account sigo
    3. From the sigo account, created the frigaut account, and used NetInfo Manager to change the uid/gid to 3090.
    4. chown the frigaut account with new gid/uid as root.
    5. Connected both laptop thru ethernet (got a 169.254 working address when referenced from this local network).
    6. rsync'd powerbook to macbook using: 
      PB> rsync -Hlptruv /Users/frigaut/ frigaut@169.254.xx.xx:/Users/frigaut
      This of course has the advantage of preserving soft and hard links, permission, but not owner. Ownership can be preserved using option -o, which I did not use here. There's of course the problem that owners may not have the same uid on both systems (like www?), so I don't know how this option performs.
  2. /USR/LOCAL: Once the user accounts were transfered, I transfered /usr/local, still using rsync. had to chmod 777 /usr/local on macbook and Xfered things as myself, not root. Got rid of a number of things in /usr/local after the Xfer (Trolltech, trimmed svn backup directory).
  3. DEV TOOLS: Installed the Developer Tools and X11.app n the MacBook, from the install CDs.
  4. FINK: Re-installed fink from scratch. This was really painless. Many packages are in binary form, so it goes real fast. The MacBook also helps whenever compile time comes. gcc is really fast on this machine.
  5. WEBSERVER: Copied over /Library/WebServer (mounting the PB from the MB)
  6. BLOG: I tried several things for the blog. Basically, what it needs is:
    • Movable Type. I just transfered the mt-static in the CGI directory (as part of moving /Library/WebServer over). No need to re-install, especially as this install was fairly recent.
    • mysql, and the perl DBI and DBD.
    I knew from previous experience that this install could be tricky. I had my share of problems, which were related to the php installation: that's because before trying to make movable type work, I wanted to make phpMyAdmin work. And it did not. I finally tracked this to php. I needed to install php5 (from entropy.ch) and edit the http.conf to use it (at the same time, I changed http.conf to enable DAV). Simply add at the end of /etc/http/http.conf: 
    # begin entropy.ch PHP module activation
Include /usr/local/php5/entropy-php.conf
# end entropy.ch PHP module activation

# begin entropy.ch PHP module activation
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
# end entropy.ch PHP module activation
    Then phpMyAdmin was working and I could create the mt user and db. The rest was without problem:
    1. I installed mysql from the binary universal release found at mysql.com (including a nice preference pane),
    2. installed perl-dbi using fink,
    3. and perl:DBD from CPAN
    I could then access the blog admin panels and post on the blog with ecto.
  7. APPS: Moved applications, install new versions when available.
  8. ITUNES: De-authorized PB for iTunes.
  9. Recompiled yorick for darwin-i386. Recompile many other libraries:
    • fftw3
    • fftw2
    • ncftp
    • epics base
    • note that I installed hdf5 and libpng thru fink (they had close to the latest version)
  10. To date, I have only had issues with:
    • the epics SDDS extension, needed to build Striptool
    • ffmpeg. Can't build the darn thing.
    This is because only gcc-4 is available on the macbooks. And not all packages compile under gcc-4 of course.

Posted by francois on May 15, 2006 08:36 AM |

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