Hackers guide to setting up any laptop...especially ones that cost $1.5K less than a Mac.
For beginners... https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_guide
All others... https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide
Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac
231–240 of 267 posts
Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac
#232- The goal of this post is to automate 80% of the bootstrapping, allowing you to setup a new Mac in a matter of hours, not days. Who uses -days- setting up your own computer ?
If I'm not restoring an image (which is the right way but technically cheating).
It takes me maybe an hour from inserting USB stick to been able to develop (most of that is watching progress bars), Vagrant has helped with that hugely.
Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the speed to download xcode + updates is related to your Internet speed, surely? Nobody says Linux takes days to set up and then reference their Internet connection...? I've got fibre, so perhaps I'm biased. Also, I avoid Homebrew/MacPorts etc. because the apps don't fit in with the window manager properly.
Yes but the parent comment is about installing in minutes vs hours vs days. I proposed my story where it took hours to download Xcode and eventually days to fully get my system setup. I also once had Fibre then moved to a bigger city without Fibre. Who doesn't say linux doesn't take days to setup? I say my OSX took days to setup, if you have a counter anecdote then elaborate.
With that internet speed, it could take days to do anything. :D
Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac
#234One of the most valuable skills someone can have, in my opinion, is not getting attached to really specific workflows or settings or tools. Instead I value being flexible and being able to adapt to whatever system I'm using. In practice, this means that whenever I think about making some change to my software environment, my first impulse is to ask myself, "do I really have to change this?" This is a 180 from my old,…
I take the strategy that I will customize and learn tools that are free to use and deploy anywhere. That way I can effectively work in any environment that doesn't dictate 100% of the terms.
That said, I've only being through 2 applicable jobs, so whether long term this is a good strategy, I dunno.
Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac
#235This is interesting given that OS X is anything but a hacker's paradise. The platform is very locked down, discourages tinkering and customization, and given how expensive Apple hardware is, this is the least accessible and most exclusive out of the three main players. Even worse is when developers make it the leading platform for their software, like in the case of Atom, where the Windows support is awful given that…
> why not just use your Linux flavor of choice and cut to the chase
Because desktop Linux is simply not sufficient for me as a daily driver. It is unpleasant to me, it's highly frictional and there are a thousand shitty cuts everywhere that you have to endure for the legitimately good development environments you can get there. I am a software developer but I'm a person first and as a person Linux-on-the-desktop doesn't work for me. Quality matters to me, and OS X's user experience is qualitatively better for my use case.
If OS X didn't exist, I'd still be using Windows and SSHing everywhere. But OS X is a happy combination of the tools I want to use (including ones that don't exist on Linux--I use TextMate 2, for example, because I'm not a big fan of Sublime Text) and a desktop environment that doesn't make me endure it rather than enjoy it.
(And as for expense: if you've got a job as a software developer in the developed world, you can afford Mac gear. If you can't, that sucks, but frankly I'm gonna still use the best tools for my job.)
Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac
#236Most of these I already have. I use GNU/Linux at home and it's what I'm most comfortable using, but at work I need OS X for compatibility with Adobe products. Any software that makes OS X feel a little bit more like home is a good thing.
Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac
#237> allowing you to setup a new Mac in a matter of hours, not days Wow, it takes days for people to set up their Macs? I would be interested in something that would make this take minutes, not hours. It's already pretty easy to setup a Mac for development in a few hours.
I recently received a new MBPr from a work laptop and I would totally agree it takes days to setup from scratch. * It takes hours to download Xcode * It takes hours to download OSX Updates * Setting up Homebrew, Zsh, Vim, Browsers, GitHub, Dropbox, Mail, Rbenv, Rubies, Cloning work repos * Getting those other smaller things you were tinkering with, Z, Go Everyones dev setup is different. So I'd agree it takes days to…
Huh, I'm not sure why you say it takes "hours", it takes about 15 minutes for me to download it on a 50Mbps and that's not exactly fast.
When you get a new machine, at most you'll be one or two point updates down, and you can just use a combo updater, again, about 15 minutes to download, another 15 minutes to update.
Every one has their own dotfiles set up but I have a script that pulls my dotfiles, installs every package in a Brewfile, and while that's going on, I can set up my mail by just switching on iCloud in System Preferences.
So for me, when someone says it takes days, I don't know what to tell them. You must have really slow download speeds for it to take days. I can get started in a day, less than 4 hours total to get set up. 'days' is a BIG overstatement.
Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac
#238My stumbling block is always that I start with macports, which requires Xcode, which requires logging into apple, app store, long download, long install ... Do I understand that brew does not require xcode and I can jump straight from a new machine to `brew install git` (for instance) ? If so, why does anyone use macports over brew ?
You can download the command line tools directly, you may need to be a registered Apple dev first though
Simply typing gcc on a pristine Mavericks system will also prompt you to download the command line tools.
Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why I use Ubuntu's default Unity on desktop and OSX Macbook these days. For me it just works. Ubuntu has even more powerful window managing key bindings by default (on OSX I need Spectacle). For all other things I just don't care.
try Amethyst on OS X : )
Still not a real window manager :(
Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the work of Jonathan Perkin (from joyent): http://www.perkin.org.uk/ It's great. It really is. I never understood why it's not used by more people. Homebrew is simply awful.
Just curious, what's wrong with Homebrew? I'm just a student, not a full-time developer, but I've never had problems with it and find it pretty pleasant to use.
They don't (as a policy, IIRC), include libraries for dynamic languages, even when those libraries has native dependencies.
Hence, trying to get such libraries installed with homebrew results in dependency hell, as the package manager won't handle those dependencies.