First Impressions of Macbook Air with preinstalled Mountain Lion

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Last Friday night I picked up my new Macbook Pro and thought it might be worth sharing my initial experiences. Coming from a late 2011 MacBook Pro with HDD I’m loving the speed and lighter form factor.

Mac OSX Mountain Lion demotes /usr/local/bin in path

Homebrew’s ‘brew doctor’ command warned me about my PATH.

Warning: /usr/bin occurs before /usr/local/bin

This means that system-provided programs will be used instead of those provided by Homebrew.

It turns out /etc/paths has listed last /usr/local/bin. Ever since reading Dan Benjamin’s post, Using /usr/local I’ve been…erm…using /usr/local. I’d be interested to know why Apple made this change.

MacGPG2 can mess with libiconv

While on the topic of PATHs, you don’t want this in your PATH: /usr/local/MacGPG2/bin

For some reason this was the cause of me being unable to compile native extensions in the tiny_tds rubygem. GCC appears to have been grabbing that item and then finding /usr/local/MacGPG2/include/iconv.h which conflicted with the OSX installed version. (Brew tells me the package is no longer provided as OSX provides libiconv).

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