One month old MacBook Pro
A month ago, I got a MacBook Pro. This is my first mac and the experience has been very good.
The first thing that caught my attention was the contrast coloured keys. Not only do they look nice, the tactile feedback from the keys is very fulfilling. After the CRTs, this is my first computer with a glossy screen. The reflections are noticeable and everytime I move, I have adjust to the lighting which was not a chore with my netbook which had matté display. However, the auto-brightness control is flawless.
Now while booting up, I was asked the usual questions about my name, etc. and within minutes the machine was up and running. Grandpa was very impressed by the screen. We loaded up iPhoto and copied pictures from his recent US trip and they looked simply awesome.
Finally, it was time to get the hands dirty. My account had sudo privileges and the next thing I did was to fire
sudo passwd
to change the root password. Now, in the GNU/Linux world, the distro is bundled with a package manager. So, all you want to do is apt-get install / zypper in software. They download the binaries from their servers (after you subscribe to the repositories) and you are good to go. However, it seems that in the BSD arena, there is a culture of building your own software. I was aware of package managers like Fink, MacPorts and Homebrew. Homebrew seemed to be a popular choice with new people and so I decided to with Homebrew.
To compile stuff on MacOS, you need get developer tools called XCode. It is free and massive download from the Mac App Store. After the download was over, I found a new App in Applications called “Install XCode.” Installation was breeze and within a few minutes, I had Homebrew installed. wget, aria2c, etc compiled and I was happy.
I am not particularly a fan of iTunes. I find it complicated. Previously I used mplayer right from the terminal itself to play music. So I fired
brew install mplayer
It failed. It turns out that Apple has decided to discontinue shipping gcc without llvm with the new XCode. Most of the people who had this issue reported that using brew with “–use-gcc” solves the problem. I suppose that they that previous versions of XCode installed before upgrading to 4.2 but for me I had no choice as Lion was pre-installed.
Finally, thanks to the people who don’t like the bloat of XCode, I found a package that had just gcc related stuff (http://cloud.github.com/downloads/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer/GCC-10.7-v2.pkg). So, I removed XCode, installed this and installed XCode again and viola, I had mplayer…
Also, the default Terminal.app simply sucks. iTerm2 is far better and it has support for Page-Up and Page-Down keys also.
peedy's interesting life 