[OS X TeX] Oh boy!!!

[Herbert Schulz]

Howdy,

I've finally did it! I just got a grand, spanking new 15" Powerbook  
with the 100GB/7200RPM HD (the Seagate, which is very quiet, luck has  
it) and 2GB RAM. Setting it up was reasonably easy but I'm sure I've  
still forgotten something.

I used the Migration Manager at first startup (I think it might be a  
bit dicier after a user is defined) and it did a surprisingly good  
job; even moving fonts, etc., from the /Library/ directory which  
somewhat surprised me. Of course the wonderful things I had in /usr/ 
local/ didn't come over and that didn't surprise me. After a bit of  
simple testing I was ready to spend a period installing my favorite  
things.

Next I started re-adding the tools that had to install kext's, etc.;  
e.g., CocoAspell and the Kensington Mouse Driver.

First installed X11 and Developer Tools (updated to the latest  
XCode). I don't use X11 too much but when I need it... and several i- 
installer packages do nice things when X11 is installed. I use the  
Developer tools even less but there were a couple of times I was able  
to use it to learn how some things worked (at least a little bit),  
e.g., TeXShop, and I've compiled a few things myself, e.g., png2ltx  
for converting png formatted chess games to LaTeX using the skak(new)  
package.

Finally installed the base set of i-packages (in the order  
recommended). Made a copy of the texmf.local from my old machine and  
substituted it for the one generated by the initial install of the  
TeX i-package, fixed the owner, did a sudo texhash and ran the  
configuration stage again; I've got a bunch of fonts, etc., and this  
seemed like the simplest thing to do since the configuration files  
were already updated there; I had the latest TeX i-package on my old  
system too. After some simple testing I added the whole bunch of  
other i-packages I use. Everything was working fine but I knew there  
were things I forgot.

So far the only problem I've had to fix has nothing to do with TeX;  
well, only indirectly. I keep a local CVS repository on my machine  
(like to keep track of some of my LaTeX related projects) and I had  
forgotten to bring that over from my old system. Brought that over  
and fixed up ownership and now that is working too.

Preliminary tests seem to confirm that it is taking about 1/3 the  
time to compile LaTeX documents. This is as expected, since I've gone  
from 550MHz to 1.67GHz and my experience when changing to a 80GB/ 
5400RPM drive from a 30GB/4200RPM drive and going from 512MB to 1GB  
RAM in my old machine didn't change the compile time for LaTeX files  
noticeably; it seemed to be compute bound.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest.com)


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