First steps with Mac OS X

I recently bought a macbook, as I needed a laptop (my old toshiba was holding with tape for more than one year, and the hardrive finally failed a few days ago). I bought a macbook because they are cheap in Japan for a student (less than 1000 euros including apple care), and as Apple has a few, mostly non customizable models, it should be easier to get information for running linux on it.

This post will be the first one of a serie describing how to use traditional unix tools, and maybe also mac os X specific tools to produce usable softwares related to numpy/scipy/pymachine on mac os X platforms: compilation and packaging issues, etc...

First, the necessary bits for building numpy + scipy

1. Install the developers tools (xcode and co):
   
2. Install subversion: UB are here

Informations for compiling UB: here and here. Packaging information can be found here.

Creating a dmg from a folder:

the command line seems to be hdiutil (you can do it with the disk util, but I would rather be able to do it from command line). It looks like the following work to make a dmg from a folder:

hdiutil create -fs HFS+ -srcfolder SRCFOLDER -volname VOLNAME IMGNAME where SRCFOLDER is the folder where you have the files to put in the dmg, VOLNAME the volume name and IMGNAME the name of the .dmg file.