The first thing you need to do for this kickass setup is to make sure you have room on your harddrive. I downloaded the ‘everything’ package which was 1.96gb. (There are alternate packages though, listed below). To get these packages, you’ll need a bittorrent client, which I’m not going to go into how to use, then you’ll need to grab the torrent files. You can choose between the following torrent packages:

• Everything: #1 #2
• Qt: #1 #2
• kdesupport: #1 #2
• kdelibs: #1 #2
• kdepimlibs: #1 #2
• kdebase: #1 #2
• kdeedu: #1 #2
• kdegames: #1 #2
• kdenetwork: #1 #2
• kdepim: #1 #2
• koffice: #1 #2

Note: All links labeled #1 are from the official mirror which is linked to at the bottom of this post. All links labeled #2 are my own personal mirror. Also, these files are only for OSX 10.4

Also, as quoted from the official page:

You must install at least Qt, kdesupport, and kdelibs for any of these packages to work. Also, kdepimlibs and kdebase are recommended since a number of things will want them. (…and it has Konqueror)

Once you have downloaded these packages, installation is a breeze. It’s just like installing any other OSX application. Double click on the dpkg, then click on one of the mpkg files provided inside the Finder window.

From here, just continue installing the files until you have everything you want. They will be stored in /opt/kde4. (It’s a Fink distribution). According to the official snapshot page, you need to launch these applications from a terminal window. Now, I did not need to do this, but I do not doubt the knowledge of the developers. (My shell setup is *way* modified compared to the default OSX release.) So to take care of these few issues, you need to run the following in a terminal window:

export PATH=”/opt/kde4/bin:/opt/kde4-deps/bin:/opt/qt4/bin:$PATH”
eval `dbus-launch –auto-syntax`

As I said, according to the main page for these files, it says to try to launch them from the terminal. If launching them by double click does nothing, here is how you can start them:

/opt/kde4/bin/kwrite.app/Contents/MacOS/kwrite

These directions are based off the official ones which can be found here. I would just like to take this time to thank the KDE developers for what they are doing. They are really taking a stand to improve the desktop interface overall. This project really shows the strength open source can have if harnessed properly.

Note: I’m still a gnome guy.

Here are a few screenshots for you:
Kwrite:

Konqueror:

Last weekend I got phpSysInfo’s Darwin support almost up-to-par with the other OS’s it supports. I still have a few things left, but I’ll be submitting them back as a patch here shortly. :)

Today, I spent most of the day working on ThreadBound when I should have been starting my huge project for school that is due on Friday. Besides setting up a bug tracker and doing the usual bug fixing, I actually added a completely new feature to ThreadBound — an MVC based REST API system. It’s actually pretty complete and shouldn’t change much from here until the site goes live, since all I do now is create new class files and methods. Right now, it only has clones of Flick’s flickr.test.echo and my own version of flickr.test.null. Of course, all of mine go by threadbound.* instead of flickr.*.

This site may go down for a few hours sometime within the next 3 days. I’m transferring the domain from enom.com to godaddy.com. Hopefully things will be fine when the transfer is done.

I’m off to bed now.

The Kenwood Apple Store was true to their word, they called me the day they came in. I ended up getting to the store around 6:30-7pm and it was packed. These things must be selling like hotcakes because I know they sold 3 of them while we were waiting on the cashier to see if they had any 2gb ram sticks in stock — which they didn’t. So I’m still 1gb of ram short until my reserved stick comes in. They do have a nice deal going right now though. You can get an HP Photosmart C3180 printer for free with your MacBook if you are buying it on a college discount. You have to pay upfront, but you get a rebate for the full price of the printer, similar to how they were running the iPod deals.

So far my experience of moving from Linux to OSX has been pretty grand, as I hinted at above. The built in wireless coupled with my new WRT45G, that I hadn’t tested the wireless on, seem to be working much better than my old setup. It’s so nice having wireless again, no cat5 cable to get tangled up in my mouse. Application-wise, I have already found a replacement for everything I used on Linux. I knew all of these before I even owned a Mac though, since I talk to/code with a few people that own a mac.

Heck, in the three days I’ve had this thing, I’ve already spent $50 in software. I bought textmate since it appears to be the best coding text editor on the planet for the mac and web 2.0 crew. I’m definitely liking it so far, but I’m on the hunt for PHP plugins now. They are a bit saturated with Ruby plugins. ;) I still need to get a legal copy of Photoshop CS2 for this box though. If only it was cheaper…

I’ve also had the joy of being able to run a lot of my favorite Linux applications on this thing. Fink is quite a nice system. I already have X11 running at startup, without that stupid xterm. I’ve modified my shell settings so everything I need to start X apps from Terminal.app is there and ready to go. I suggest all of you go out and install Xdroplets. Combined with this custom X11 setup and Xdroplets, I have a pretty standard application interface for running my old applications, such as XMMS or Konqueror for testing.

To give you some idea of how fast this laptop is, I have two benchmarks for you. While I was writing this post, I started a compile of Apache 2.0.59 to start setting up my development environment for ThreadBound. Here are the command that I ran:

$ ./configure
$ export MAKEOPTS=”-j6″
$ time make

What are the results? Astounding, considering this is a 10-20 minute compile on my old Athlon64 3200+ laptop…

real 1m37.240s
user 0m53.671s
sys 0m37.242s

The other benchmark is from when I installed Windows XP on my friend’s MacBook Pro, which is identical to the one I bought. After installing Counter-Strike: Source, we ran the video stress test. These machines averaged 114 FPS on it. This test set all of the settings on high, so we tried it. We were getting about 60-90 FPS at 1680×1050 during games. This just goes to show you the performance of this machine. Considering that people don’t know that the x1600 graphics cards they ship with are underclocked by around 45% below what ATI ships them as, due to heat. So I’m going to have to overclock them a bit and see how it does.

Here is a nice picture of my MacBook Pro:

Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo Opening Hosted on Zooomr

More pictures of it can be found here.