We’ve just finished retiring our old Apple Macintosh equipment. An eMac and elderly Dual 1.42GHz G4 PowerMac are now surplus to requirements. When it was released about four years ago, the PowerMac was the most powerful Macintosh you could buy. I think it cost about £2.3K.

Such is the improvement in technology, that we’ve replaced both of these Macs with lowest specification MacBooks. To these we’ve upped their RAM to 2GBytes (because you can never have too little memory) and their hard disks are now 7200 RPM 100GByte drives. With some other bits and pieces, total cost came to about £1K each (including VAT).

The migration from the PowerMac to my MacBook was an interesting experience, so I thought I’d write about it, and make some subjective judgements on the differences.

Upgrading the MacBook

Every generation of Mac and PC equipment seems to have better accessibility to user-servicable parts. The MacBook is no different. Replacing the memory or the hard disk is fairly trivial, provided you have the right cross-headed and Torx screwdrivers. Indeed, it can only take about 10 minutes to replace both. The most difficult part is persuading the memory shielding to get back into place, where a flat-head screwdriver or fruit knife comes in handy.

Installing Mac OS X

This was going to be a MacBook that didn’t need many of the iLife packages or trial software installations. Apple provides the option for a customized installation, allowing you to select which applications to install.

Once Mac OS X was up and running – in about 25 minutes – I then installed some additional packages that provided me with developer’s tools: Xcode and the X11 SDK.

Migration

Apple also provides a Migration Assistant which enables you to connect your old Mac to your new Mac via a Firewire cable. It then pulls all of the applications, documents and settings from one to the other.

However, it doesn’t work if your home directory on your old Mac isn’t where Apple puts it. So, although it brought across the applications, nothing else made it. It’s not a great problem because all you need to do is:

• create a root user on the new Mac
• login as that user
• delete everything below the home directory that the Migration Assistant created
• copy the equivalent contents from the old Mac to the new Mac
• chown these to the user of that home directory:

  chown -R chris /Users/chris

You might think that Apple should make this easier. But, if you know how to move a user’s home directory away from where Apple puts it, you should certainly know how and why to do the above. Bottom line: if everything is where Apple expects it, there’s shouldn’t be a problem.

After I moved everything across, I logged out of root, and back in as my user account. Everything was there as I had expected (and hoped!). It was just like being back on my old Mac.

Going Universal

The entire Apple Macintosh range is now Intel-based. Their predecessors were all PowerPC-based. The lowest specification MacBook runs on a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo – that’s two processors.

Applications built for PowerPC processors don’t run on Intel. There are two solutions:

• To upgrade the applications with versions that are built for Intel. Apple calls these Universal applications, because they contain two versions: one for PowerPC and the other for Intel. Indeed, Apple’s free software development kit provides one-click building for Universal applications.
• To keep running the PowerPC-based applications. Really! Apple distributes a technology called Rosetta which provides dynamic translation of PowerPC code into Intel code. It really works.

I therefore went through all of my installed applications, downloading versions with Universal builds. It was also a good opportunity to identify those applications that I no longer used and could therefore discard.

I then launched many of the applications to discover which needed re-registering. The now-defunct You Synchronize needed re-registering and the Macromedia Studio MX 2004 software (all PowerPC applications) needed re-activating. Nothing else did.

I did have an issue with Apple Mail, which refused to do full message searches on old messages. I needed to delete and rebuild Spotlight’s metadata stores by using mdutil.

DarwinPorts and other web development tools

DarwinPorts is our main repository for web development tools. Rather than scouting around websites for the tools we use, DarwinPorts provides access to over 3,400 open source software packages. (Note: DarwinPorts has recently been renamed MacPorts).

One of the consequences of moving from PowerPC to Intel processors is that no previously installed DarwinPorts software will work. DarwinPorts installs everything in /opt, so I needed to delete that directory and rebuild all ports that I use.

We have a corporate wiki that is used to record our notes on installation of software. As a result we have two pages of notes that enable us to install everything we need in a predictable, reliable manner. This means Apache 2, PHP 4, MySQL 4, Ruby on Rails, Ruby gems etc. Everything installed smoothly and very quickly.

Performance

Based on my early experience, PowerPC applications run marginally slower on the MacBook than they did on the Dual G4 PowerMac. But the important point is that they all work.

Native, or Universal applications are significantly faster. MarsEdit Live Preview now works, and doesn’t slow down my typing. The Java-based jEdit is blisteringly quick and searching is incredibly fast.

Graphics appear a little below par in some areas – Exposé and Dashboard reveals are marginally more jerky compared to the G4.

Introducing Parallels

As web designers, it is important that we test websites on Internet Explorer on PCs. Prior to our MacBooks we had a desperately inadequate Dell Laptop, which we used as little as possible.

Parallels provide virtualisation software which enables Intel-based operating systems to be run inside a window on Mac OS X. This isn’t the same as emulation. This is the real deal. With Parallels Desktop it’s possible to have Windows XP, and many other operating systems running a MacBook.

I installed Windows XP on Parallels Desktop. The performance improvement over the Dell was staggering, even with just 256MBytes of RAM allocated. After installation, I activated Windows XP, and then downloaded all of the numerous windows updates. Parallels also provide a set of PC-based tools which enables Macintosh peripherals to work seamlessly with Windows XP.

So, I now had an installation of Windows XP with Internet Explorer 6. But how to get Internet Explorer 7? The beta version doesn’t play nicely with Internet Explorer 6. The solution was to clone my first Windows XP installation, and then install Internet Explorer 7 on the copy. (Mark’s tip!) This progressed satisfactorily despite the IE7 installer announcing that it needed 10GBytes of hard disk space.

I now had two installations of Windows XP running on my MacBook at the same time. Fiddling with their host files enabled me to browse websites running on the MacBook, thus making the whole setup an ideal platform for developing websites.

Conclusion

Upgrading from the Dual G4 to the MacBook went fairly smoothly. There is a notable performance improvement for Universal applications. Everything else is marginally different. But, from a web developer viewpoint, the ability to run other operating systems simultaneously whilst still running Mac OS X is the most compelling reason for upgrading.