Five years ago today, I bought a mac mini to do book development. On Wednesday, I bought a new mac mini simply because I’m told that Mountain Lion won’t install on a vintage 2008 mac mini, and because my readers have hadproblems on Mac OS X 10.8.
Overall, I have continued to be unimpressed, and can’t help but wonder why my open source friends seem attracted to this system. Even after downloading Xcode command line utilities, I kept encountering messages like “can’t find C compiler” and “C compiler cannot create executables”. Configure is something I haven’t run (at least not directly) for years, and my primary operating system is Ubuntu.
Apache no longer is something you can launch from the settings. System Ruby is still at 1.8.7. You need to upgrade openssl simply to install Ruby 2.0.
That being said, I’m impressed by the folks behind RVM and RailsInstaller who are doing their darnest to make this something that people don’t need to concern themselves with.
I indeed built suexec with homebrew... and got the messages about configure not being able to find a viable compiler, despite previously having solved similar problems in order to install the json gem. I tried various symbolic links, but ended up downloading the full XCode.
But I agree.. homebrew is another example of awesome people attempting to make up for things that I have become accustomed to “just working”.
The “optional” install of the commandline tools, under recent versions of XCode (XCode→Preferences⇒Downloads), is not really “optional.” Nor, of course, is installing XCode itself.
Apparently, even after installing both, apr-1-config --cc returns a path to a compiler that does not exist:
$ apr-1-config --cc | xargs ls
ls: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/OSX10.8.xctoolchain/usr/bin/cc: No such file or directory
I’ve been able to work around all of the problems I’ve seen, but on my todo list is to Erase and reinstall OS X as the primary purpose I bought this machine for is to be able to reproduce and test installation problems.