Category: Workstation

Mistakes I Made When Setting Up My WinXP/OSX Intel-Based Mac

I really like my little Intel-based (Core 2 Duo) Mac Mini. It has a small footprint, low power draw, and it has wifi (so I don’t need a Cat 5 cable snaking through my apartment). Surprisingly, after comparing it to other small-footprint systems with comparable specs, the Mac was about the same price and came with the added option of running OSX. I set it up as a dual-boot WinXP and OSX system so that I can continue to run all my Windows software, as well as checking out some of the nifty Mac software (like the night we sat around making humorous commercials for the Chevy Volt using Garage Band and iMovie).

Aside from just using Apple’s Boot Camp to select which OS I wanted to use the next time I started the computer, I also installed rEFIt, a boot-loader that will let me select which OS I want as I start the system, and VMWare Fusion, so that I can run WinXP from within OSX.

From my experience with with a dual-boot WinXP and Ubuntu Linux laptop, I wasn’t looking forward to sharing files between the 2 systems by setting up an antediluvian FAT32 partition. However, one of my friends recommended MacDrive, a program that allows Windows to read from and write to an HFS+ volume. Magic, right?

Everything was looking rosy, until I decided to be stingy and give Windows XP a 10 GB partition.
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Totally Hosed My Dev Environment

So I have been trying to play with the Zend Framework, which by all accounts is pretty cool, and trying to get it set up on the dev environment that I have here on my cute little macbook. Sadly, for some reason the version of os X 10.5 that ships with it doesn’t have pdo_mysql support installed (though it has pdo_mysqllite ?? I mean, come on, seriously?) So it’s off to the recompile mines. Sadly, once you recompile PHP you need to recompile Apache, which wouldn’t be a big deal at all other than my not knowing about it and it not giving me anything like a coherent error message regarding this. Fine, whatever….

Next, I discover that I can’t user the PEAR auto-installer, because it can’t find the damn modules directory, and neither can I. I have even tried making new ones in every likely place. What’s worse, I seem to have also lost traditional MySQL support as well.

I’m getting pretty annoyed with OSX here, It’s a damn nice client OS, but it’s driving me nuts on the server side. (Still better than Windows, it’s just a bit like the The Twilight Zone, things are close enough to where they should be to make you think that you know what’s going on, but when you try to actually do something….)

I guess I’ll try MAMP now. I have been meaning to look at that anyway.