New toy

Well, I could resist no longer. I trundled along to the Apple store on Regent Street and bought myself a 15" Powerbook with all the trimmings. I didn't actually want the enhanced graphics card, but the retail operation didn't carry all the possible permutations and I definitely wanted the version with the bigger (100Gb) hard disk and extra (1Gb) memory. The extended warranty is insanely expensive, but there's not really any choice—knowing my luck with such things, if I risked it and didn't get the warranty, the machine would pack up at precisely 13 months old.

Anyway, I've decided to keep some sort of track of what I'm installing and configuring on the machine to make it comfortable for me as a long-time Linux user. The main point of this is that if I have to start again from scratch for some reason, the whole process will be easier to repeat; however, there's a chance that some nugget of information here might be useful for somebody else in a similar situation.

The initial setup seemed pretty smooth, and I transferred across all of the files from my Windows box and my Linux box. Transferring the MP3 collection took a little longer, though—35Gb takes a while to move over a 10Mb LAN—so I left that running overnight.

The first thing I installed was the Xcode package package from the OS DVD-ROM that came with the machine, in preparation for some development activity.