Darwin Ports: Casualty of Migration
Posted by Doug Tue, 14 Mar 2006 13:33:48 GMT
I’ve been a big fan of Darwin Ports for a while. It’s a relatively painless way to install open source software on your Mac. It borrows heavily from the FreeBSD ports. Gentoo is also based on this type of a system. Basically, rather than packing up binaries and offering them for download and distribution, Darwin Ports packages up instructions on how to download and compile applications nicely for the Mac.
I was able to successfully migrate my /opt tree with all my custom built ports in them over to my new Macbook Pro. However, all those binaries are PowerPC binaries. They all run under Rosetta emulation. So my blindingly 4x faster Macbook Pro runs all my Ruby on Rails tests at the same speed as my 1.33Ghz G4.
The solution appears to be mv /opt /opt.ppc and rebuild all the ports from scratch. I’ll post more when that’s all done.
Check out: <http://hivelogic.com/articles/2005/12/01/ruby_rails_lighttpd_mysql_tiger>.
I haven’t found a better way to install Rails and associated components on a Mac other than whats on that link. Its updated for Intel-based Macs as well and resolves some issues w/ Lighttpd on Intel.