I dropped XAMPP on my Mac yesterday to do some offline dev work. It really highlighted the shortcomings of my 12" PowerBook G4. It's been a tireless workhorse over the last five years, being replaced once by a newer, swisher Intel Macbook Pro that lasted less than six months before I sold the new upstart and returned to the old faithful. It's great for running a web browser, a few terminal sessions and a mail client. But asking it to run Apache and mysql with PHP running on top is proving too much. It's taking about a minute to render a local copy of this blog!

Here's why the G4 is great! http://garan.org/why-macs-are-great (from November last year)

So it's time to start thinking about a replacement. Macrumors.com is anticipating a September release of Macbook and Macbook Pro upgrades. I don't need the power of the Macbook Pro range but the aluminium case on this model has seen a lot of bumps and scratches without a hiccup, most recently being bounced off a shelf in the garage onto the concrete floor! So the rumors of an aluminium case for the lower end Macbook along with investment bankers anticipating that Apple will lower prices to maintain their market edge. Glass trackpads that will give iPhone'esque gesture controls are another possibility so I'm going to start saving!! :D

I'm going to be spending somewhere between eight and ten hours on a train this coming weekend so I thought I'd setup a development environment on my Powerbook. I didn't particularly want to download all the sources and complie them up so I tried Darwinports. It didn't quite work and to be honest I wasn't surprised - I've put so many different things on the laptop since I've had it that it's in a bit of a mess.

So I looked for something else and came across Apache Friends. Currently they've got a beta version of XAMPP that installs Apache, MySQL, PHP & PEAR, SQLite, Perl, ProFTPD, phpMyAdmin, OpenSSL, GD, Freetype2, libjpeg, libpng, zlib, Ming, Webalizer, mod_perl, eAccelerator, phpSQLiteAdmin. Sounded too good to be true.

The installer has a .sitx extension which needed StuffIt to decompress. The first time I tried to open it, it fired up Excel - see point above about machine being b0rked! Installed Stuffit and it installed like a dream. There's a little website included that acts like a control panel, allowing you to view the phpinfo(), access the mysql php admin screen and try out a couple of demos.

I'm impressed :)

I took my Mac Power Book to the local Apple Authorised Technical Centre to be fixed. It's got a one pixel wide green line down the centre of the screen. It needs a new screen but Apple are out of stock on them.

The sad thing is that I'm missing it!