February | 2008 | Self-Assembled

Personal Installation of OS X 10.5.2

February 27, 2008

Adventures with OS X. I decided to keep a detailed record of my fresh, custom install of OS X 10.5 (Leopard), after being an Apple “switcher” and Tiger user for about six months. I’m also a computational chemist, and my install will feature many scientific or programming related applications. My Mac is a Santa Rosa MacBook Pro (65nm Merom, 2.4 GHz, 2007), and it’s great.

Backup

Before performing the erase and install, I backed up everything to my Seagate Freeagent Desktop 500GB external USB drive. It was partitioned into three sections: one for a Disk Utility backup, one for a SuperDuper 2.5 backup, and one for a Winclone 1.6.6 archive of the Boot Camp partition.

Special Items

There were a few things from Tiger which I wanted needed to export or remind myself of their location before continuing: Mail.app settings for Gmail IMAP, Aquamacs key binding customization, Safari Bookmarks, and a custom py25-pyx Portfile.

The Fresh Install Procedure

After backing everything up, I performed an “erase and install”. I like my OS nice and clean, with no settings or software left from a previous version. I customized the install to exclude foreign languages and most printer drivers. I retained X11. There are a lot of lists on the web touting themselves as “50 essential Mac apps” are other nonsense. My list of installed apps really are essential for my day-to-day workflow and entertainment. I strive to keep my system as minimalist as possible. The following items were installed in order.
10.5.2 combo update downloaded from Apple’s website. Note, my Freeagent was not detected from inside 10.5.0, and I did not want to use software update for this step. Reboot.
Xcode 3.0, Dashcode, and the ADC Reference Library. Xcode and Dashcode were optional installs from the Leopard DVD, and the ADC Library was copied to /Developer from the March ADC Monthly mailing disk image, which I had stored on my Freeagent. The ADC Library contains over five gigabytes of documentation which is not installed by default with Xcode.
Xquartz 2.1.4, a significant upgrade over Leopard’s X11. This will be needed later by Macports applications which use X11. Jeremy Huddleston and Ben Byer maintain this package, and both work for Apple.
iLife ’08 and iWork ’08. They’re nice collections of apps. I find Keynote, iPhoto and iMovie to be of particular value.
After all the Apple software was installed, I performed the online Software Update. 14 updates were found. By design, none of the applications had been opened yet. After a reboot, I completed the keyboard firmware update and ran Software Update again. Two updates were found; I did not keep track if they were part of the original batch of 14. The last updates installed smoothly.
Now was a good time to open an iWork application and complete the mandatory registration, and enter in my Quicktime Pro upgrade code.
Flip4Mac 2.2.0.49 and Perian 1.1 began the parade of third-party applications. These are nice codec collections for Quicktime, although I think VLC is pretty good too.
Caffeine 1.01 and iStat Nano 2.2 are two widget applications. Caffeine loads in the menu bar, and is a simple way to toggle power-saving features of laptops. I prefer the minimalist approach of iStat Nano over the more popular iStat Pro.
Skype 2.7.0.257, their first official Leopard release. Not everyone can be reached via iChat.
VMD 1.8.6, a wonderful visualization tool for chemists and biologists.
Aquamacs 1.3a, a port of the popular *nix editor, emacs, to an OS X native Aqua interface. Awesome. I want to use the Xcode IDE environment more, but Aquamacs has better syntax highlighting for Fortran, and I use emacs on Linux systems.
I also installed a fortran plugin for Xcode 3.0. I learned about this at the nifty site macresearch.org. The only drawback to using Xcode is that its syntax highlighting for fortran isn’t quite as good as aquamacs / emacs. Anyway, don’t forget to defaults write com.apple.Xcode DBGFortranBasePath /opt/local/bin/gfortran-mp-4.2
Macports 1.6.0 base installer.

Macports Configuration and Package Installations

There is a bug in the Macports 1.6.0 base installer which doesn’t set a couple paths (and perhaps other things) on Leopard. So, I ran the Macports svn repository postflight script.
Next, I edited a setting in sources.conf to install my macports local portfile: py25-pyx, and copied the Portfile to the appropriate local directory.
As I have two cores for compiling, I set the macports.conf buildmakejobs to 2.
Now it’s time to “port install” the packages I need. Macports will automatically install the ports for any dependencies. I started with gcc42 (4.2.3). Leopard/Xcode 3.0 comes with gcc 4.0.1 and does not provide gfortran.
Next, the parallel compiler package, openmpi +fortran (1.2.5). Again needed to handle the 4.2.x compilers and parallel fortran.
grace (5.1.21), a wonderful 2D plotting program which is also popular on Linux systems. Grace uses X11, and one of its major dependencies is openmotif (more on that later).
PyX, a Python package for creating 2D/3D graphics with a TeX interface. In Macports, this is py25-pyx (0.10). I need PyX for some 2D vector graphics creation from simulation output. A notable dependency of py25-pyx in my Portfile is TeX Live 2007 (by default it depends on teTeX). Several users have had problems installing texlive on Leopard, possibly due to missing openmotif or a strange X11R6 path problem. There is a syntax bug in a TeX Live fonts map file which PyX warns about, but it is easily corrected. Finally, py25-zlib (a dependency for py25-pyx) failed to build, but I came up with a workaround.
ImageMagick (6.3.8). This suite of command-line graphics tools is great to have on any *nix system. It’s useful in scripting when dealing with large numbers of graphics files.
I recently installed Tkinter and the Python Imaging Library. py25-tkinter needed the same workaround as py25-zlib, but py25-pil installed easily. At least one person has found my note about the zlib and tkinter workaround to be useful.

Leopard System Preferences

The first thing to go was the desktop background, which was changed to the Black & White “Sea Mist” provided by OS X.
I set all four hot corners, to Screen Saver, Expose, Dashboard and Spaces.
Next were two of my favorite settings which I probably should have changed earlier, Trackpad clicking and two finger secondary click.
To Dashboard! I added iTunes (I like that little control) and Stickies, while deleting that ridiculous calculator.
On to more serious work. Gmail IMAP setup isn’t that bad (see the gmail link in my Special Items section), but the best options aren’t documented on gmail.com. Do not store drafts or notes on server, do store junk on server. I use “plain text composing” because many good people still use Pine. I deleted the Apple Hot News RSS feed. Set the IMAP Path Prefix to [Gmail]. Now the initial IMAP mail import can be done. When that’s finished, right-click on the Gmail folders to use the Gmail ones for Sent, Trash, and Junk. Note, the IMAP sync to Gmail’s “All Mail” folder was rather slow, as has been noticed elsewhere. Also, my Spam folder is filtered on the Gmail side so that items in it do not appear as unread.
Security settings! Amazingly, even after installing 10.5.2, the Leopard firewall was still disabled by default. So, after allowing ssh remote access in “Sharing”, I enabled the firewall (allowing ssh) and enabled the screen saver + login password prompts.
Speaking of ssh, next I copied the names and addresses of the machines in our lab’s local network from our main fileserver’s /etc/hosts file, and added them to my Mac’s /etc/hosts file.
Open PDF files in Preview instead of Safari, by default.
Lastly, banish the 3D dock. How I hate it so. This not only makes things look better, it visibly increases performance of minimizing/maximizing windows, dock scrolling and dashboard. I had already applied the Leopard Graphics Update 1.0, and this performance difference is still present. Hopefully it’s fixed in a future OS X update, but I do like the 2D look better anyway.
One thing which did not have to be changed was disabling Bluetooth wake from sleep, which Leopard does by default (Tiger did not).

Put the External Drive Back to Work

It was about time to restore my personal data. My movies, music, pictures, data and anything else that was backed up but not yet reinstalled. This was the easy part; I just had to be sure to restore the iTunes database by copying over all its folders.
I configured Time Machine to use one of the three 160 GB partitions on my Freeagent. This allows me to keep a complete backup of my old, bootable Tiger and Windows partitions for the time being. Unfortunately, the first attempt at using Time Machine failed! I had erased the partition and set it up to do the initial TM backup, then I went to sleep. Although it was running on external power, my MBP apparently went to sleep as well, after about 10GB of the backup. TM did not recover gracefully, and I had to cancel it, and reboot in order to successfully reformat the Freeagent partition. I tried Time Machine again the next day, this time using the Caffeine applet to disable system sleep. It worked.