Hurley's World

For my new job, I got a shiny new Mac Book Pro. For the most part, I love it. I can run Windows on it so I can test my web pages in Internet Explorer. Some cool features exist in Tiger that I really like. But setup hasn't been as straight forward as I had hoped it would be. Don't get me wrong, I still love the mac and OS X, but I've been a bit frustrated the past few days.

First, the last time I had to set up Developer tools was on an older 12" Powerbook. It took me awhile to determine that the Developer tools for my new laptop was in the XCode Tools folder on the restore disk. I guess if I did the type of programming for which XCode is the most useful, namely desktop development and compiled languages, I would have figured it out much sooner. But I have to admit, the folder setup wasn't intuitive.

The second issue was that even after I installed the Developer tools, cpan didn't seem to work. It kept having errors with make. I looked in /usr/bin and there was make. What I didn't know at the time is that since Apple includes two versions of make, bsdmake and gnumake, they don't install either one of them as make, but rather, they install the utilities separately and make a symbolic link to gnumake. However, cpan doesn't like this symbolic link. There are two ways to fix that, install a make program as /usr/bin/make or set the make configuration option in cpan to one of the two. You can do this by issuing the command 'o conf make', e.g. 'o conf make /usr/bin/gnumake'. So if anyone is having a similar problem, please try this before giving up.

There are a few other issues that aren't Mac specific, such as not being able to install Dapper Drake as a Parallels partition, but those two were pretty frustrating.