My precious 12" powerbook "Hardtack" died for real this morning. 

As a result, I now have a brand spanking new Macbook (that I hate..sort of). As I am rediscovering all the things and a geek needs to "feel at home" on a system, I thought I might document and pass them along.

I also learned a thing or two about hard drives and S.M.A.R.T., so there is some of that as well.

Read on

Technically, the Powerbook didn't die, but the hard drive did at least. And I knew it was coming. Over the past year or so the hard drive occasionally gets...funky. Last night it got really bad, clicking like crazy, the whole system kept locking up (forcing hard reboots). S.M.A.R.T. status, ironically, claims it was fine.

So, I rushed out, got a new 120gig hard drive (cheap! why not upgrade that 60gb in the process). After having a few hours to settle down, the system fired right back up and pretended like nothing was wrong. 

A brave face, I know. 

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to do a complete disk duplicate (Mike can be found on efNet and is full of good advice).
Before shutting it down, I decided to download and build smartctl to try and get a better idea as to what was happening to my powerbooks hard drive.

You see, System Profiler only reports the most basic of S.M.A.R.T. information on the hard drive. If you ever see SMART claim the drive is going to fail, it's because the status has degraded to the point where it's calculating 24 (or less!) run hours before failure.

I knew my drive was failing, but SMART didn't. Or at least System Profiler wasn't reporting it. after running a long offline drive test, I had a better idea of the problems.

Turns out my little powerbook had nearly 15,000 hours on the drive. That's almost two years of continuous run-time. With that in mind, the overall drive "health" was about 90%, but I knew better. It was dying of old age, and soon.

This morning it passed away. 

After driving around Abu Dhabi for three hours looking for a Torx #6 driver, I finally gave up. It's time for an upgrade, my PB has been limping along for the past couple of months, it's time. I went to the mall and began to investigate a replacement. After a few stores carrying Apples and a hard fought internal battle between the Macbook Pro and the Macbook, I finally decided that form factor was more important than power. 

Now, let me say this up front: I hate the plastic, I miss my aluminum chassis. To further compound issues, it has an arabic keyboard (I could have gotten a Macbook Pro with US standard). The arabic keyboard is only a PITA because it has 'extra' keys and the layout is notably different in a few places. Obviously I am surviving, but it's a pain nonetheless.

So why didn't I buy a Macbook Pro? They are HUGE. This 13" widescreen is a monster compared to my little 12" powerbook, a 15" MBPro would dwarf it. So pure and simple, form-factor dictated purchase.

And on to the really geeky stuff.

Things a UNIX/linux geek wants to do on a shiny new Mac

First, dig out the CDs that came with it. CD #1 has the XCode Tools package on it, and you will definitely want it. 'make' and other goodies are there.

Fix your shell. Add these lines to your .bash_profile to make things (in my opinion at least) more comfortable

export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=ExFxCxDxBxegedabagacad
bind "set completion-ignore-case on"
bind "set show-all-if-ambiguous On"

This will colorize your prompt a little, and relax tab-completion.

Grab smartctl
Learn from me, it's important to pay attention to your drive, and it's sort of neat to see how much stuff is logged even if you don't realize it.

Quicksilver
This isn't really in-line with unix/linux geeks moving over..but trust me. Ask any mac alpha-geek about quicksilver...it's a must have. 

SSH Tunnel Manager
This might sound stupid, but I use SSH tunnels heavily. HEAVILY. It's just a simple little app that makes automatically connection easier.

There are about a million other tweaks an utilities that I could recommend, but these are some of the more important ones.