With a little money and a lot of effort I have been able to get OS X 10.4.7 running on my IBM T42 laptop. Being a member of the ADC has its perks and I would encourage anyone with an interest in programming for the platform to join. Here are the details of my developer box:

IBM T42 (Type: 2373-CXU)

• 1.8 GHz Intel® Pentium® M
• 2 GB DDR Memory
• 80 GB Hitachi 7200 RPM HDD
• 60 GB 7200 Hitachi RPM HDD (Ultra Bay)
• Intel Pro 2200b/g (non-working)
• AC’97 Audio
• Cambridge Silicon Bluetooth
• Radeon Mobility 9600/9700 (M10/M11)

Now that I have this machine setup to my liking, I will be using it to drive most of the content development for this site (both UI and back-end). The first major project that I will be completing with this setup is my new firewall installation.

Edit: The no muss part is now a lie, apparently all of the jostling I did to get parts in and out while testing patches has damaged the left-Alt-key (which is functionally the left-Command-key) which will require that I a) fix it (???) or b) replace the keyboard. I’ll see how peeved I get over having to press that translucent cone when I want to Command-<key> something…

Edit2: New keyboard has been installed. There is nothing like the feeling of a brand new keyboard… clean, smooth, lint free, smudge free and just a little stiff. I am a *very* happy boy right now.

Edit3: The platform is virtually unusable. When trying to move data around the load average spikes to 4+. I typically need to move around multi-gigabyte data sets and having my machine crawl while doing a cp from a usb drive is not an option. Additionally network throughput is abysmal, the device thinks it’s operating at 1000baseT but data transfer rates say otherwise. I’m not sure how much longer this can last.

Edit4: 20070819_T0105 - I’ve moved to Fedora 7 on the laptop (been here for a while now) and moved back to the original wireless card IPW2200B/G and I’m happy. The OS X install was just too slow. I’m digging the slickness of the new yum and all of the improvements to RPM. Backend development has resumed and I’m looking for a new host as midPhase is just too unreliable; more on this once I have moved.