Bagel Belly Blog

Rebuilding the Powerbook

As previously mentioned, fresh from the success of my hardware fix, I wiped the Powerbook's hard drive on Friday evening, and started the slow process of rebuilding my machine.

The main reason for doing this was that for some time now I've been running with between 2gb and 4gb free, which doesn't leave a whole lot of space for working in. I've read that pushing HFS+ beyond 90% full is risky (doing that for any filesystem is risky, I guess). I also know there's lots of cruft kicking around, including broken copies of my mail, multiple copies of X11, Gnome, etc. It currently takes about 30 seconds for my desktop to be up and running after logging in, which is just plain annoying. I have to take stuff apart to truly understand what makes them tick (hardware and software), and you never know how good your backups are until you use them, right?

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I've been making regular backups of my hard disk using CarbonCopyCloner, so after doing that, I threw in the Apple OS X DVD and set things going. Learning from previous experience, I was able to narrow down even further the list of stuff to install by default, leaving out extra printer drivers, languages, and (hurrah!) Internet Explorer. After a few minutes of whirring and copying, I had a fresh install of OS X. A fresh install ... with 72GB available. Not bad!

The machine pretty much spent the rest of the evening doing a whole load of software updates. I let it run while I watched a film on the linux box beside it. As soon as the software updates were done, I installed Firefox and Quicksilver. Without those two apps, I felt like I was working with both hands tied behind my back.

I then set about configuring the Preferences to my liking - specifically:

• In Appearance, setting the Font smoothing style to Medium - best for Flat panel. This really improves the readability of the text.
• In Dock, reducing the size to small, Magnification to medium, and Automatically hide and show the dock. I hardly use the dock, so I like it out of the way and unobtrusive.
• In Security, setting Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screensaver, and Disable automatic login. This is me being a security freak. I don't go as far as password-protecting the open firmware, but it should deter idle troublemakers.
• In Displays, setting Show displays in menu bar. I plug the laptop into the TV frequently, so it's handy to be able to see the displays and select the right TV mode from the menu.
• In Keyboard & Mouse, Trackpad, setting Use trackpad for clicking, dragging. I don't understand why this isn't a default. The trackpad is clunky without it.
• In Sharing, setting the Computer Name to something ... a little less boring. Also, enable Remote Login. Computer name because... well, just because. Remote login because it's useful to be able to ssh into my laptop from elsewhere.
• In Speech, Spoken User Interface, setting Speak the phrase: Excuse me!, Speak the alert text, Announce when an application requires your attention. It's useful to have the computer say "Excuse me, Firefox needs your attention" if you're away from the keyboard. Not to mention that it freaks people out.

I then set about restoring stuff: first up was copying my mail. I seem to have 1.4gb of it at the moment, so while this was copying, I went hunting for old preferences in the backup. Simply copying ~/Library/Mail is not enough: there's a preference file com.apple.mail.plist in ~/Library/Preferences/ that is also needed. This is the same for other applications too... and some have more than one - for example ecto seems to have ~/Library/Preferences/ecto.plist and ~/Library/Preferences/kungfoo.tv.ecto.plist.

The next application to install was fink, since working without nano is simply not an option. And because I've spent too long using a Mac and I'm now too feeble to handle command-line stuff, FinkCommander.

I'm feeling blind without MenuMeters telling me what's happening with my bandwidth, CPU and memory. That's next on the install list, followed by the painful copy of my iLife data (photos and music), and an installation of iLife '04. This takes me down to 34GB free ... half gone. With a copy of my development environment (just the source code, not the applications), I lost another 11GB. Oooof.

Other things missing are my Keychains and Address Book. They are kept in ~/Library/Keychains and ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook. It would be nice if all this user data was kept in one place.

More toys to install next: NetNewsWire, VLC, Desktop Manager and (sigh) Windows Media Player. Growl and Konfabulator (with Weather, GrrChat, iTunes Remote, SMART, Wastebasket), and SlimBatteryMonitor.

When you reinstall from the OSX DVD, an unfortunate side-effect is that the third-party applications that come pre-installed on the Mac are missing - in particular, GraphicConverter and OmniGraffle. I hastily installed the Gimp package and then ImageMagick via Fink, which replace GraphicConverter for now. I bought a license for the new version of OmniGraffle, so that problem is solved too.

Finally, in an attempt to stave off the day when I need to install MS Office, the latest beta of NeoOffice/J is installed.

Other things I do:

• Drag the Utilities folder onto the left-hand side of the Finder. It saves drilling-down into Applications. Likewise my "Downloads" folder. Though actually, with Quicksilver this is mostly irrelevant now.
• Set up Terminal Window Settings to close the window when the shell exists, use a default window dimension of 80x48, transparency of about 40%.
• Install SSHAgent, and tell it to manage global variables. This saves remembering passwords.

So now I have a mostly complete setup, and 12GB free. That's a gain of at least 8GB, and I have large applications like GarageBand and iMovie installed. I still have some development tools to add, but I have room to maneuver and best of all, it only takes 5 seconds to log in. Progress!