I’ve replaced my trusty 700MHz G3 iBook with a new 12” PowerBook. Between doubling the CPU clock speed and upgrading to a G4, the difference feels like night and day.

The OS X Setup Assistant made short work of most of the transition, but then it was time for the finishing touches.

hardware upgrades

Memory and an external Firewire hard disk (I resolve to have better backups in 2005) from Other World Computing.

disk partitioning

To partition or not to partition - not an issue with my iBook’s 20 GB hard disk, but an attractive option with the PowerBook’s 60 GB. After much dithering back and forth, I settled on 3 partitions.

emacs

Panther includes emacs 21.2.1. Unfortunately, carbon aware emacs is slated for 21.4 and currently needs to be built from the CVS sources. Alex Rice has made an Emacs.app Bundle available, but I like to build my own.

zsh

Panther ships with an up to date zsh 4.1.1. Unfortunately, there is a bang completion bug in 4.1.1 when run in a process buffer of a natively windowed emacs.

uControl

You can’t use emacs without the control key and that means you need uControl to put a control key where it’s meant to be. I needed to tweak the installer’s InstallationCheck script to force an install on 10.3.7.