More Mac mini software

I’ve switched IM clients already. Fire just wasn’t as featureful/configurable as I would like, so I’ve started using Adium X. Got Firefox for the pages that don’t work right in Safari. Fink of course for additional Unix goodies (mostly extra compilation stuff). SSHKeychain provides a convenient interface to ssh-agent and simplifies key management. DoubleCommand lets me remap some keys (ie I can make my Ctrl key act like an Apple Command key), and the next version should differentiate between left and right keys allowing me to have both a Ctrl and a Command key (since Ctrl is sorta essential for emacs). That reminds me, I’ve also come up with a nicely packaged copy of emacs (from cvs).

On the Unix/server side of things, I’ve got postfix enabled so I can send and receive email from the mini. Installed Complete MySQL from ServerLogistics (nicely packaged and includes a preferences panel) in preparation for serving up php/mysql webpages. I got lighttpd installed since I figured it would perform better than apache since I don’t need all of the features present in apache (although it looks like it’ll support just about everything I need… php, fastcgi, ssi, authentication, compression, etc). Since I had to build that from source (many thanks to The Exciter for documenting the build on OSX and providing a path to get it to build), I got encap’s epkg utility to build under OSX. Encap is a tool developed at UIUC that facilitates sane Unix package management. From the Encap FAQ:

Encap is a package management system for handling third-party package management on a Unix system. Through the magic of symbolic links, it allows you to install each package in its own directory, but still have everything accessible via the traditional location in /usr/local.

If you ever build Unix packages from source, I’d highly recommend it. I’m not sure whether I just wasn’t finding/setting the right configure option, but I had to manually hack a Makefile to get it to build under OSX (found a hardwired “-arch i386” in there somewhere).

I’m still looking for a slick FTP/SFTP app. I’ve tried Fetch that’s been around since the dawn of time. It was nice, but I’d rather find freeware/opensource if I can. And at some point I should get gnupg set up and integrate it with Apple’s Mail.app.