These are notes on how I set up my mac. I found this useful for my own recovery when I sent in my old powerbook for a screen replacement, and unexpectedly got a new macbook pro in return. Having this note file on my backup disk shortened the restart time.

Useful (?) Links

My Setup

This is basically just a log of what I did when setting up software on my Macbook Pro running Leopard 10.5.x
  1. End of Caps Lock

    First things first: replace the Caps Lock key with Control, as God intended it to be. Open up System Preferences, Keyboard & Mouse. Select the "Keyboard" tab, then click on the "Modifer Keys" button. Change the Caps Lock to "^ Control".

  2. Switch Shell To Tcsh: ($HOME/)

    Open System Preferences > Accounts. Click the lock in the lower left to enable the Advanced menu. Ctrl+click on an account name to set the login setup for that user. You can change Leopard's default login shell, the account's home directory or short name, etc.

    I considered zsh...
    but held off on a switch and stuck with the more familiar tcsh.

  3. Emacs (/usr/bin/ /Applications/)

    There are several Mac emacs options I've tried over the years, and I'm still not sure I'm entirely satisfied with my final solution.
    1. OS X Native :
      Leopard comes with emacs 22.1.1, but no application for carbon support. In my first emacs attempt, I followed these instructions to make an application wrapper around the default emacs installation. This setup seemed to work initially, but I quickly began to run into an error every time I tried to open up emacs from the terminal command line: > emacs LSOpenFromURLSpec() failed with error -10810.
    2. Carbon Emacs
      This is what I'm currently using, and I'm mostly happy with it. I keep my familiar emacs keybindings, with the command key as my "Meta" key (and Caps Lock as "Control"). I can copy text with M-w and then paste it into a Terminal window with Command-v. I can copy text from Firefox with Command-c, then yank it into emacs with C-y. I made a shell alias in my .tcshrc to use this Emacs.app instead of the default Leopard installation:
      alias emacs 'open -a /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/emacs'
      Then from the Terminal I can just type 'emacs' to open up a single emacs session at dawn. Then I use "C-x 5 2" to get new frames in new Spaces as the day goes on, and all is well. One minor annoyance: using that alias from the command line like this: emacs file.txt doesn't behave as it should. That should open up file.txt if it already exists, or it should give me an emacs window with a new, empty file.txt if it doesn't. It isn't perfect, but I wrote this little script to solve the problem. Put it in $HOME/bin/, add a new alias to .tcshrc, and its good enough for me.
    3. AquaMacs
       This is another Mac-specific emacs option, but it is a little too Appley for my taste.
    4. Carbon XEmacs:
      a port of XEmacs for the Mac.


  4. directory structure (/usr/)

    OSX does not have a built in /usr/local directory. If you want to have one as a place to put things that you install yourself, then you should create it here, use it consistently by setting the install directory for future installations, and put it in your path so your programs can be found. If you use fink for package installs you will get a /sw directory, and macports uses /opt (see below). It is not a bad idea to keep user installs in /usr/local so they are separate from your package installer and OS installation.

    > sudo mkdir /usr/local

  5. Quicksilver (/Applications)

    This is essential. If you need convincing, google for it, or listen to these evangelists:

    AstroBetter
    43 Folders
    Lifehacker

    Download and install from BlackTree

    Set up triggers for x11, itunes, safari, system pref., emacs, etc

  6. ssh ($HOME/ /etc/hosts)

    Make a ~/.ssh/config file with host names and port numbers of oft-used remote machines.

    Trusted X11 Forwarding:

    if you are going to ssh into another machine, and intend to display X windows locally on your mac, you need to use trusted x11 forwarding. You can enable this option each time with "ssh -Y", or you can make an alias in your .tcshrc file: alias ssh 'ssh -Y' or you can allow it explicitly in .ssh/config : ForwardX11Trusted=yes

  7. passphrase authentication

    For quick, secure ssh access to favorite machines.

    on your mac: ssh-keygen -t rsa1

    [enter passphrase]

    then scp the .ssh/identity.pub file over to the remote machine, and append it to the .ssh/authorized_keys file.

    DNS issues : ssh from home (at least) is really slow. No easy fixes found, but it seems to be a DNS issue. Not a leopard bug, but a problem with my westell 327W router. Two solutions are available:

    a) insert the openDNS addresses into the DNS servers box for the home setup:

    208.67.222.222 (resolver1.opendns.com)
    208.67.220.220 (resolver2.opendns.com)

    b) insert the ip addresses of the boxes that I want to ssh to/from into the /etc/hosts file:

    128.100.100.100 some_host
    128.100.100.101 another_host

    I have implemented option (b) for now. I'm not sure I like openDNS.

  8. Mac Developer Tools (/usr/bin/)

    important software dev tools, including the gcc compiler. Install xCode 3.0 developer toolkit from OSX install disc 2. (or get an account and download from developer.apple.com) I did the standard install to /Developer, but in Xcode 3.0 you can install to a different location if desired.

    version 3.0 does not include a fortran compiler. I downloaded the binary installer from macresearch.

    Quick compile test of some old f77 code works ok. Needs to be watched...

  9. Package installer : fink vs macports

    Many OSX installations are easier and smoother if done by hand, but occasionally you will come across something with a complicated web of dependencies that you don't want to mess with. In that circumstance you may want to use a package installer to preserve your sanity. In MacOSX your choices are fink or MacPorts (nee DarwinPorts).

    I've used both, and they can both do the job. As I understand it, fink is based on apt, so debian fans may like it, macports has perhaps some closer ties to the mac developers, so apple-lovers may lean that way. It seems to be mostly a matter of taste. I would recommend just picking one and sticking with it. From here on out, I'll be using MacPorts.

  10. Macports (/opt/local/)

    NOTE: BE SURE TO INSTALL THE XCODE DEVELOPER TOOLS BEFORE MACPORTS

    Download the dmg installer from www.macports.org and install. Macports itself will be put in the newly created /opt/local directory.

    The installed runs selfupdate for you. Be sure to selfupdate before doing any future installations.

  11. rsync backup

    Time Machine looks nice, but it can't do backups to a remote network disk. Carbon Copy Cloner looks like another nice option, but I believe it has to be a push-based backup, instead of a pull-based backup (unless your backup drive is a mac running CCC, perhaps). The best solution for me is to set up a network backup using an rsync script with passphraseless authentication. Here is a good explanation from the Carbon Copy author:



  12. file transfer tools

    ncftp: a full-featured ftp client (/usr/bin/)

    wget: handy for grabbing files via http or ftp (/opt/)

    install via MacPorts

  13. X11 in leopard

    Documented issues with Leopard's X11: http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=80171

    More details : http://homepage.mac.com/sao1/X11/index.html

    An open-source X11 project called Xquartz is driving the bug-fixes that eventually get packaged into OSX updates. Get ahead of the curve by installing the latest Xquartz binaries: http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/xquartz

    X11 behaves very differently in leopard. See Sao's page above for details.

  14. Python

    Leopard includes a python installation by default, but you'll want to add on some useful packages.
    The Enthought Python Distribution is excellent.

    It includes ipython, matplotlib, Mayavi, numpy, and SciPy. There are lots of other libraries included, but with those 5 working smoothly right out of the box I've got no complaints.



    Alternative installation paths:
    1. Before the EPD arrived, I used the Scipy superpack for Mac OS X by Chris Fonnesbeck

      Note: this installs a new version of numpy (v1.0.5) to replace the version that comes packaged with leopard, and the binaries being installed are based on very recent SVN releases. You also get a new version of setuptools, readline, and pymc alongside ipython, matplotlib, scipy and numpy in your site-packages directory.

      Everything works except the matplotlib v0.98pre installation. I wiped away that egg and the egg entry in easy_install.pth, then just installed matplotlib by hand: download v0.91.2 .egg from sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=80706

    2. Using macports:

      port search ipython
      sudo port install py25-ipython

      port search scipy
      sudo port install py25-scipy

      port search matplotlib
      sudo port install py25-matplotlib

      but it seems that it doesn't find the system built-ins when searching for dependencies, so it wants to install,e.g. python-2.5 and numpy, etc. even when they are already there.

    3. Using the built-in easy_install:

      sudo easy_install ipython

      - this seems to work fine... but I found some problems with readline support. The superpack version updates readline, and therefore seems to work better.

      sudo easy_install matplotlib

      • this latter doesn't seem to work.
      • but matplotlib has an egg that can be downloaded
      • unzip the egg (it will unpack into the cwd, so create a .egg directory and unpack it from within there)
      • put the .egg directory in the site-packages dir so its on the python path, and then run the sudo command above, giving it the name of the .egg directory (you don't want to be downloading anything from sourceforge, so nip that in the bud if it starts)


  15. python modules : pyfits

    download from stsci

    untar and install:

    sudo python setup.py install

    this puts it in the site-packages directory. Specify --local="/destination/directory" to put it somewhere else.

  16. resize and move windows

    One of the biggest annoyances of Mac OSX is the inability to move and resize windows intelligently. You have to grab the title bar to move it, and the lower right corner to resize. Very inconvenient.

    See my guest post on the AstroBetter blog for info on MondoMouse, MercuryMover, and other alternatives.