I work for a small interactive media company and the Boss announced that he is upgrading all our Windows based PCs to shiny iMacs! They arrived yesterday so I’ve been playing around with Leopard and spent a whole day installing software and stuff and getting used to the differences. I’ve haven’t had an Apple system as my primary system before. I’m used to using Windows XP and Linux. (More on Linux use in another article)
Along with being the token IT guy, my main role is PHP Developer and for this I’ll probably be retiring the 700MHz P3 development server (currently running Gentoo Linux: setup by my predecessor). I should be able to easily run Apache, MySQL and PHP on my new iMac. I’m also looking forward to doing some iPhone development.
One thing I still need to figure out: nicely managing updates for the iMacs: Of our 6 workers 5 are now using some form of Mac (3 new Intel iMacs, 1 Intel MacBook Pro and 1 G5 Mac Pro) so there will be a lot of the same downloaded. We only have a 1.5Mbps ADSL connection in the office, and I would need to setup a cache or something.
The guys didn’t let me download the 561MB 10.5.4 Combo update so I just downloaded the offline version at home where I have an ADSL2+ connection at around 8Mbps. The iMac came with 10.5.2 but the iPhone SDK requires at least 10.5.3 so I couldn’t install it yesterday.
So by COB yesterday I had most of the daily software I use installed: Eclipse and Firefox (with extensions) being the main ones. I’m still waiting for Flash and the rest of the Adobe Create Suite to arrive before I can migrate properly.