10 142 2007-12-21T16:25:55-05:00 $Date$ NormanWalsh 2007Norman Walsh My Mac's back (sortof). Next time I have to do the reinstall dance, these notes will help. Apple claims my problems were user error, not hardware error, i.e., they went away after they reinstalled the OS. I'm not convinced, but what can I do. (There's a longer story involving unrecoverable filesystem errors and multiple iterations of the reinstall dance, but I'll spare you; if I touched something electronic this week, it probably broke.) How to rebuild your Mac environment… Reinstall the OS. Run Software Update. Repeat until it says it's done. Restore all your backup data. Merge your old home directory into the new one that the install created. (Next time I might create an admin user just for the purpose of avoiding this step.) Install X Code so that you have development tools. Install X11; for some inexpliciable, non-obvious, and hard to find instructions for reason, this involves control-clicking on the Install Bundled Software Only icon on the install DVD, selecting Show Original, and then clicking on the X11User.pkg. Install MacPorts. Use MacPorts to install (at least) wget, msmtp, mercurial, subversion, and gnupg. Install a recent python distribution. Install PyXML (yes, I know there are better things, but I have legacy…) Download and install expat. Do the perl -MCPAN -e shell shuffle to install XML::Parser, XML::XPath, and RPC::XML. In System Preferences→Sharing enable Personal Web Sharing and Remote Login. Figure out what version of Apache is actually part of the OS. Get the sources for that version. Build that version with the right suexec parameters: Move src/support/suexec into /usr/sbin and chmod it 4555. Restart Apache. Check the error log to make sure it worked. Install Adium, Adobe Reader, Caffeine, Canon i9900 printer drivers, Carbon Emacs, Chicken of the VNC, Disk Inventory, Epson CX3200 printer drivers, Firefox, GIMP, GoogleEarth, Growl, gSync, HuginOSX, iMovieHD6, Inkscape, iRedLite, Last.fm, Lightroom, MarcoPolo, MenuCalendarClock, MenuMeters, Netbeans, Open Office, Oxygen, Quicksilver, SSHKeychain, Skim, SuperDuper!, VMware Fusion, X-Chat Aqua, and Zoom. [Update: 3 Jan 2007] Use MacPorts to install links, p5-libxml-perl, and p5-image-info. For Sun employees only: reinstall and reconfigure punchin. (Seems like it ought to be possible to use the old configuration, but it didn't work for me.) Get tidy from http://tidy.sf.net/, build it, and install it in /usr/bin/. [Update: 4 Jan 2007] Use MacPorts to install p5-digest-md5. Cross your fingers and run Disk Utility again. P.S. I got another kernel panic while preparing this essay. Sigh. No panic.log this time. I'm at my wits end, but one thing's for sure, I'll be needing these instructions again all too soon.