OctoMac

Yesterday my MacPro came in. Eight cores, eight Gigabytes RAM, 8MB L2 Cache per processor cache—we call it the OctoMac.

Let me tell you what it took to move from my old G5 to this monster. But first, I must say that the best feature of this computer is that it’s quiet as a mouse. As I listen for the fan’s hum I can only hear it when I stop typing.

Your first stop when migrating from one Mac to another is the Migration Assistant in /Applications/Utilities. I copied over all my user data without a hitch. I didn’t copy applications because I wanted to clean up my Applications directory and since I was switching architectures many apps would need refreshing anyway.

With my home directory copied, I employed my ingenious plan to reduce clutter. I took everything in ~/ except ~/Library and moved it to ~/Archive/2007segin: Segin being the name of my previous computer. As I need things from Segin, I’ll move them back to their previous locations. For instance, to use iTunes I moved the iTunes directory back under ~/Music.

Moving directories proved that the next order was getting a driver for my trackball and one for my keyboard. These required restarts.

Restarting showed that I needed up update Accounts under System Preferences. While in System Preferences, I fixed my Displays’ Arrangement. I turned off the awful Sound Sound Effects “Play user interface sound effects”. And I decided to use green has my selection color instead of the previous orange (the default is blue). For a screen saver, I would have liked Folding@home but it doesn’t seem to work on my computer: their loss. I guess electric sheep will have to do.

Next came Desktop Manager. Though never ported to Intel properly. The page has a link to an Intel build. It has problems, but will suffice until we have Spaces. My other windowing utility is WindowShade. When combine, the two tools play well together effectively giving me two docs. The one on the right is you’re normal OS X Dock. It’s global across my virtual desktops. As are windows minimized to it. That’s how you move a window from one desktop to anther: minimize, switch, select from dock. The “dock” on the left is made by setting WindowShade’s Minimize-In-Place feature to “Arrange Minimized Windows Along: Left Edge Starting At Top”. These windows stay put on their associated desktop. It’s all very nice.

Looking at my dock, I saw a bunch of Question marks pointing to apps that were no where to be found. Time to find them: Firefox, Adium, TextMate. All of these apps use the Library properly and remembered all my info including IM archives and registration for TextMate: turns out I have serial number 66. Who would have thought TextMate would become the Emacs of the Mac world?

Though I haven’t used them yet. I remembered to get VLC media player and BitTorrent. I primarily use these to watch Tool-assisted Console Game Movies—a great way to relive childhood memories.

All this downloading reminds me to use Floppymoose to keep the number of annoying ads on sites down. As an aside, I’d like to remind you that this computer is very quiet.

Opening Mail.app I found a issue that needed immediate attention. This meant getting SSHKeychain right away. Fortunately, since all my user data already copied, I just needed to start it up.

Opening Terminal.app showed that /sw/bin/fortune was nowhere to be found. After attending to the immediate, I downloaded the package manage Fink. Using FinkCommander.app, I found fortune-mod without any trouble.

At this point, the crazy a disjoined style of Aqua, Metal, and “we don’t have a name for it” window themes was starting to annoy. Time for UNO, Aqua4iTunes, and GrApple for Firefox. Now all my windows have a light-gray chrome.

With windows looking good, time to focus on work. Flex Builder and Apollo I installed from the Apollo Camp DVD. For Lisp, we use SBCL. Subversion is a necessity. Ruby and Rails needed some attention too.

Polish and prettifying are the only major things left. CandyBar makes adding custom icons easy. CocoThumbX makes it easy to come make icons from images. For nice looking icons, InterfaceLIFT is a place to go.

There you have it: the thirty things you need to do to migrate on the Mac. And lets remember that the new OctoMac is remarkably quiet even when all the processors are running full steam.