Order of the Bath

As you may guess from the title, I have made the decision on how to switch away from Windows. It is not that Ubuntu had any problems but, having discovered that I would need to get new hardware anyway, the Mac PRO seemed to be the most reliable option at the best price. Yes, I spent more than I intended but they have jolly good salesmen who know their stuff down at Western Computer.

I have also scaled back the virtualisation plans to just a single XP guest running under VMware Fusion but I will talk more about that in a future post.

In general, installing software on the Mac is just as easy as on a PC; in many cases easier if you do the PC properly with a separate admin account—you don’t need to on OS X because of the Sudo based “run as admin” facility which really works. But some of the more obscure open source packages don’t have proper installers, probably due to low demand and/or lack of resources. One of these is the POPfile email classification (anti-spam) system. It works fine but is a pain to install with a dozen pre-req bits and pieces, some of which need to be compiled from scratch and even the documentation is a bit out of date. Having now done it, I will make my contribution to the project and publish an install script. Not a full blown installer, because I don’t know how to do that, but a scripted version of all the little bits that have to be done which will make it much simpler … [more]

This entry was posted on 15 Apr 2008 at 21:09 by Rick and is filed under email, Mac, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.