Ardent Meridian

I have completed the setup of the first two systems, specifically my primary Vista x64 instance and the OS X build.  Rather than taking my existing configurations for these systems, I started from scratch with bare drives.

This was partly out of a desire to keep things pure, and also because my primary Vista installation was something I did nearly 18 months ago and much of what was involved there has been forgotten and/or has changed.

Vista x64 – Installation & Configuration:

This was very nearly as straightforward as one could want.  The basic O.S. installation took about 25 minutes, with another 5 or so to install Apple’s drivers for the system.

Service Pack 2, which was recently released, made the overall setup less involved than it might have been a few weeks ago.  Being able to get the bulk of the updates I needed simply by installing SP1 then SP2 and not needing half a dozen reboots for all the other minor updates that were released in the time between them.  Though SP2 not being a cumulative update is annoying (if not terminal).

I run a triple monitor setup, comprising a 30” Apple Cinema Display at 2560×1600, and that is flanked by a pair of Dell 2007FP monitors in portrait orientation at 1600×1200.  Windows will NOT let me configure those displays as-is, and required the addition of ATIs Catalyst Control Center to setup properly.  This is not a major issue – you are going to install the ATI drivers for ATI cards anyway, but it should be something that Windows can handle natively.

Printer installation was effortless.  This is progress over the first Vista build I ever did, where it took almost 6 months for HP to produce a driver for the HP Color LaserJet 2500n that actually worked in color!  The Epson Artisan 800 install was extremely slick, especially given that I installed it as a wireless printer/scanner/memory card reader.

So all in, it was about 2 hours to get the OS installed with the appropriate drivers for things like the afore-mentioned printers, a Logitech MX Revolution mouse, Microsoft LifeCam 6000, and a Logitech G13 auxiliary keypad.

The next 8 hours were spent installing my standard suite of software, which includes Microsoft Office 2007, Visio 2007, Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, VMware Workstation, Photoshop CS4, LightRoom 2.0, iTunes, Windows Live Essentials, TweetDeck, Nero 9, Trillian Astra, Skype and the usual array of utility applications such as SyncBackPro, WinRAR, 7-Zip, Adobe Reader and so on.

All in I was finished with everything in well under the allotted two days, and everything wound up operating correctly.

OS X – Installation & Configuration:

This is only my third time installing OS X.  My first Mac since OS X released was my MacBook Pro in the middle of last year, so I wound up wiping and re-installing that once as a result of a Boot-Camp instance of Vista somehow managing to screw up the entire drive.  And beyond that I did a fresh install of OS X for my my Mac Pro since the first thing I did upon buying it was to replaced the standard 320 GB drive with a 1 TB unit.

Installing the base O.S. here is trivial.  Updating it to 10.5.7, and adding all the latest software updates, took about the same time, all in, as bringing Vista up to Service Pack 2, so no real complaints there.  No drivers had to be added for the basic hardware, nor for the Hewlett Packard color laser (much easier to get working over the network than it was under Windows).

The default O.S. display support was quite content to configure my monitors correctly without any special manipulation or software, which was nice and how I personally feel it should work.

Adding Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 took 4-5 minutes, followed by it wanting to download and replace the entire thing with the latest version.  Anyone making regular use of Office on the Mac is used to this, and the security or stability fixes that Microsoft keeps pushing out invariably constitute a complete replacement of the entire product.

So the raw O.S. install time was very comparable to Windows, and, as things sit currently, was similar in terms of number of restarts.  So no real issues favoring either path at this point.

VMware Fusion 2 installed without issue, and I proceeded to build a Vista x64 image with 2 processors and 8 GB of allocated RAM, to handle all the Windows-only software that I rely up on as part of my day job.  This amounted to installing most of the same software mentioned for the Windows build into said VM image (some, like Photoshop is available as a native OS X application, but that is not the version I have).  Surprisingly this took only an hour longer, end to end, than doing it on the native Vista machine!

Overall, due to a few OS X specific applications (QuickSilver, iLife 09, Office 2008) and the need to build a Windows VM and then installing Windows applications into that, the OS X installation took about 2 hours longer, in total, than the native Vista x64 build took.  I can certainly live with that, especially given that ease with which a bare-metal restore is achieved for OS X vs. Vista.

Next Steps:

The next part of this process will be to do the native Linux installation.  I am expecting this to be more problematic, mostly as a result of prior experience with the platform.

Getting the screens running properly is going to be more work than it should be, the Epson printer I am not expecting will work at all.  I imagine I will be losing most of the “clever” functionality on my MX Revolution mouse, I presume my G13 will wind up duplicating some key strokes and I dare say audio will be a swine to make work properly.

However, should that not be the case (it has been a while since I have run Linux outside of a VM in a desktop/workstation capacity) it will be documented as such.  I will be quite happy to be proven wrong on this, and fully admit my trepidation in this endeavor.  However, I am in search of the most productive end result and if that happens to come at the cost of a more painful setup, then so be it.

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