OSX

About a year ago, I had moved to a Macbook Pro and had to set up my development environment on it. It was far from straight forward and involved a bit of work.

A year on from that time, I have moved laptops again and this time I have a Macbook and OS X Leopard Version 10.5.5 and there is a world of a difference out there.

I am not sure whether it was something that I was previously doing wrong or if the packages are now being better maintained towards OS X, but compilation and installation has been a breeze this time.

The only thing that I had installed before I got started was Xcode from the install DVD.

If your Xcode package is not the latest and greatest, do get to the Apple Developer Connection and grab it.

The list of software we will finally end up is something like this:

• Apache (2.2.10)
• mod_python (3.3.1)
• MySQL (5.5.1.29-rc)
• PostgreSQL (8.3.5)
• Memcached (1.2.6)
• PHP (5.2.6)
• CouchDB

All the packages are installed in such a manner that they are installed into /usr/local/{software-name}-{version}, from which it is symlinked to /usr/local/{software-name}.

This will enable us to keep track of all the package versions and also switch between the versions in case of any trouble.

Time to start the process:

For me, the browser is the primary productivity suite. I use it for everything from email to keeping documents, workflows and many other things. Even to the extent that my browser instances can run for close to a week without being restarted, that is when they don't wind up being sluggish like a drunk mule, which happens way too often for my liking.

I started with Firefox when it was called Phoenix and did not have an installer. I have tried all sorts of browsers, K-Melon, Opera, every version of Internet Explorer till version 7 and many more that did not last for more than a couple of days at the best on my computers. But if there is anything that has been constant with all of them, it is that they have grown progressively worse with every release in terms of resource utilization.

Now, that was not so much of an issue when I moved to a Mac about a year ago. It was a Macbook Pro that sported 2 GB of RAM, which leads you to kind of be pretty okay with the RAM-tastic excesses the browsers tend to indulge in. My development environment, including Apache and the various databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL and CouchDB) and other nicknacks had about a GB to play with, while the browser itself could use 500 MB of RAM and I could not give a damn.

It is a different story altogether that even with 500 GB of RAM, the venerable Firefox would slow down with usage, and even in the stock-install extension-free mode, it would still consume memory much worse than a lifetime AA member knocking back glass after glass at an open bar. I loved my extensions, but seriously, this was getting to be way too much, with or without them. I had to find a new browser and the move to a Macbook with just one GB of RAM made it even more urgent.

It can be a real problem for people who are new to OS X to find the right software to get their routine work done.

To help such people along a bit, I am posting a list of software that I use on a daily basis.

In the first installment, I am going to post the average-Joe list and will be tackling the development platform list in a later post.