Last week my MBP finally arrived!! UPS probably had a 100% extra hit rate over the past few weeks since I couldn’t wait and I must say, my new toy has seen more cities over the world than I have. It came in a beautiful box and installation was peanuts.
After a few days working on the Mac I have asked myself the following question a million times “What have I been doing over the past years, messing around with Windows on Dell/ HP? Everything on the Mac works extremely naturally. I still have to get used to the control/option/command shortcut keys but after that’s all in my system I’m sure my productivity will get a great boost. Love all the glair btw, without making my Mac slow.

Here are some things I ran into, when installing and configuring.

Within Eclipse I needed a Subversion client. I had been a Subversive user at least for the past years, but after a short review I thought I would give Subclipse a try as well. No real complains on Subclipse but I decided to stick with Subversive. I deinstalled Subclipse and installed Subversive. After a restart I ran into a Subclipse problem where it was telling me it needed a client. I didn’t fix it since I needed to get some work done first, but after a switch to the SVN Repository Explorer I wish I would have taken the time. Eclipse hung and after a restart it wouldn’t come up.

I started up from command line with a -clean option and had a tail open on the log file in the workspace dir. The following error was preventing from starting up:

!ENTRY org.tigris.subversion.clientadapter.javahl 1 0 2010-05-12 12:01:03.133
!MESSAGE Failed to load JavaHL Library.
These are the errors that were encountered:
no libsvnjavahl-1 in java.library.path
no svnjavahl-1 in java.library.path
no svnjavahl in java.library.path
java.library.path = .:/Library/Java/Extensions:/System/Library/Java/Extensions:/usr/lib/java

Starting up in a different workspace worked out fine, but than I had to set up al my projects and preferences again. To fix the problem I found on eclipsezone the following hint: delete or rename workspace.metadata.pluginsorg.eclipse.ui.workbenchworkbench.xml, this is the file where all screenstate is stored (funny thing is that normally when Eclipse dies, the screenstate is lost I figured). This worked out perfect. I fixed the Subclipse problem by assigning it a client and now everything is stable again. Strangely enough I ended up with two SVN Repository Explorers of which only one seems to work, the other one hangs up my environment. I’ll try to fix this with a clean Eclipse when I have some spear time

To have ps -ef work out of the box on my Mac without sudo etc. I added this my ~/.bashrc (thnx to Matthew for this and other great tips). I think I messed up by running some script to show hidden files, because a friend of mine with a similair MBP didn’t run into this problem.

export COMMAND_MODE=unix2003
alias zcat='gunzip -c'

So far I have the following tools installed:

• Chrome, Firefox and IWorks…
• muCommander a Mac based Total Commander, obviously beats the Finder.
• SQLDeveloper, (not proud of it) tool for Oracle database development
• Dropbox, document sharing made easy, it’s a must have
• Adium, chat with proxy support
• OpenOffice, must have in a office world, sadly not any better than Microsoft line though, but hey this is free at least!
• iTerm backup for default terminal support, doesn’t have an option for buffer settings though so I switched back to the default terminal
• filezilla and/or cyberduck for ftp, sftp etc support, still undecisive
• Virtualbox for running VMs
• Web developer plugin for firefox
• Smultrona texteditor that has syntax highlighting, still looking for something more advanced like Ultraedit though.
• Secondbar for dual screen configuration, so you’ll have an extended menubar