Brand New Empty Mac

[John Horner]

This is a not-strictly-Perl thing again, but I'm just about to 
inherit a G4 desktop from up the food chain at work, and it's been so 
comprehensively messed about with that I'm going to low-level-format 
the HD completely and start from scratch.

Apart from anything else, this will mean I can install Panther and 
only Panther and I won't have any of those 'which perl' issues or 
multiple copies of modules.

But I just thought I'd get the opinions of the list on the best way 
to set up such a brand-new machine -- do you partition your 
hard-drives? Do you have the system on one partition and documents on 
another and so on? Any issues around the installation of Perl and 
other things like C libraries that I should be thinking about?

   Have You Validated Your Code?
John Horner(+612 / 02) 9333 2110
Senior Developer, ABC Online  http://www.abc.net.au/

Re: Brand New Empty Mac

[Chris Devers]

On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, John Horner wrote:
[D]o you partition your hard-drives? Do you have the system on one 
partition and documents on another and so on?
No. I did that with my first Macs, but always regretted it. Just leave 
it as one volume -- there's very little to gain by partitioning it.

Any issues around the installation of Perl and other things like C 
libraries that I should be thinking about?
http://www.mail-archive.com/macosx%40perl.org/msg05736.html
Quoting the relevant bit there --
There's an unpatched bug with the system Perl that prevents
some modules (notably DBD::mysql) from building properly.
ld='MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.3 cc'
with
ld='env MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.3 cc'
Other than that, things should Just Work.

--
Chris Devers  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://devers.homeip.net:8080/blog/
np: 'Hill Street Blues'
 from 'Television Theme Songs'

[OT]Re: Brand New Empty Mac

[Joel Rees]

But I just thought I'd get the opinions of the list on the best way to 
set up such a brand-new machine -- do you partition your hard-drives?
I usually do.
But on a Mac, I have decided not to to be play too smart. I'll usually 
format a gig or two for classic and leave the rest to the boot drive.

I have not satisfied myself that there is any advantage to a swap 
partition, and I won't mention why here. On the other hand, Apple may 
have decided to let fstab have some so in Panther, in which case a 
separate swap partition can help smooth the virtual memory system a bit.

Some of your Mac OS X applications may throw a hissy if they are not on 
the boot partition, or if the users are not on the boot partition, so 
you lose most of anything you'd gain with separate /home or /usr. And 
the automount puts everything under /Volumes, anyway.

However, if you plan to serve the web with that box, a separate 
partition for web stuff might give you warm fuzzies and maybe even some 
real protection. Just make sure you format any partition(s) for web as 
Unix File System, instead of HFS+. That way you should actually get the 
permissions bits to work right.

I might also have another UFS partition for PostGreSQL and other such.
I also keep a spare hugh partition if I can, for downloads and large 
images. If you have a  bigfiles partition it should be HFS+, of course.

Do you have the system on one partition and documents on another and 
so on?
No, that just buys you heartache in Mac OS X, of present.
 Any issues around the installation of Perl and other things like C 
libraries that I should be thinking about?
I like to have multiple users, one for doing serious work in, one, 
perhaps with limits on it, for surfing, and, of course. I also like to 
make two administrator accounts, just in case something goes haywire in 
one.

Most people don't really need to bother with anything fancy, just let 
the install set up run.

--
Joel Rees
If God had meant for us to not tweak our source code,
He'd've given us Microsoft.

Re: [OT] Brand New Empty Mac

[wren argetlahm]

--- John Horner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 But I just thought I'd get the opinions of the list
 on the best way to set up such a brand-new machine
-- do you
 partition your hard-drives? Do you have the system
on one 
 partition and documents on another and so on? Any
issues 
 around the installation of Perl and other things
like C libraries 
 that I should be thinking about?

Generally speaking I haven't had need to install any
libraries (or other *nix goodies) other than those
from the developer tools. I needed libraries for
OpenOffice and TeXShop, and occasionally for specific
Perl modules (expat, libxml2). Other *nix stuff I've
done include lynx/links/elinks (for webdesign testing)
and CVS. I'd say, do the stuff for OOo and TeXShop if
you're into that, otherwise just install them as you
need them.

I'm all for partitioning. I haven't had the issues
that a bunch of others apparently have (I am still on
Jaguar though). My current partitions are something
like System (4GB), Volatile (8GB), and Static (25GB).
System holds most boot and / stuff along with
developer tools; Volatile holds most of my documents,
/Users, and /Applications* (and perl's site_lib
incidentally); and Static holds my media that change
rather infrequently (MP3s, movies, developer tools
documentation, some images).

The upsides to this arrangement are: if I toast my
system I can just wipe the partition and reinstall the
OS without needing to reinstall all my applications
(*nix programs will need reinstall, but they're
smaller, by and large; and OOo will need reinstalling)
and without damaging preferences, user files, etc. On
a production rather than development box this would be
less important. Also if I want to search for something
I can pretty reliably limit where I'm looking to about
8GB out of 40. And it helps keep things looking clean
since I have a bunch of files that are shared and
/Users/shared has other purposes according to various
installers. (Though I suppose you could just dump them
all in a folder on your single partition.)

The downsides are that you need to watch your free
space when considering partition size: make sure you
have enough swap space on System (so on Panther that'd
be 3~10GB after all the OS, C libraries, *nix
programs, Xtools), and make sure you have enough free
space on Volatile for any large downloads and for the
iTunes preferences/library (iTunes gets quite
persnickety if you run out of space, and can start
harming the system too). And you need to bear in mind
the limitations of moving /Applications off the boot
partition.

* Moving /Applications is considered by most to be a
_bad_ idea. Since I have about 5GB of Aqua/OSX
applications the ability to avoid reinstalling them is
worth it to me. There are a few different methods of
doing so, I chose the one resembling moving /Users--
namely just put it where you want and make a symlink
(for /Users you'd also have to go in and mess with
NetInfo)-- because it seemed to have the fewest/least
severe issues involved with it.

The biggest problem I've noticed with this method is
that Software Update doesn't always respect the
symlink and will occasionally overwrite it with a
folder of the same name and drop whatever in there
(not always a whole .app bundle either; e.g. Safari
1.0.1 to 1.0.2), or sometimes just won't work at all
(e.g. the iTunes 4.4 to 4.5 update appears to have
gone to /dev/null every time until I made the
/Applications folder and moved iTunes into it). This
has been annoying but since I knew about it getting
into things it hasn't surprised or bothered me too
much; again, it doesn't happen reliably, just often
enough to bear in mind. The only other downside I've
noticed is that Disk First Aid can't properly scan the
disk it's running on.

If you were to follow this method, I'd suggest
installing that first huge batch of Software Update
stuff before moving /Applications over, just to avoid
any possible problems since there're so many updates
on a brand new system.

FWIW, YMMV, etc,
~wren



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