Setting up a new Mac Pro

After the Mac Pro finally arrived, I was faced with some migration issues.

1. The Mac Pro is my first desktop Mac. Moreover, it's the first time I've been using two Macs simultaneously, despite it being the fourth Mac in the house. So there are some synchronisation issues: Mail, Address Book, iCal, and so on.
2. There are some applications I want to straight-out migrate from other machines to the Mac Pro, notably iTunes from my P4 Wintel box, and Aperture from the MacBook Pro.
3. I want to decommission the P4 Wintel box as soon as I can. There's at least one legacy Windows-only application we still need to run occasionally, though, so I need to look into getting Windows running on the Mac Pro.

The first issue seemed like it would probably be the easiest, and this is how I went about it on day one:

1. Vanilla set-up of Leopard. This is about the fourth or fifth time I've set up Leopard in the past few months. I couldn't remember my AppleID, so I didn't enter it. I hadn't signed up with .Mac yet, so I left that blank as well. It found my wireless LAN and I signed in. I finished up by running Software Update until there was nothing left to update, which ended up being twice.
2. I changed the hostname.
3. (Purely to see what it looked like on a 23-inch screen, I downloaded the EVE Online client for Mac OS X. It installed and ran without a hitch. And, for the record, it looks pretty good.)
4. I joined up for a 60 day trial of .Mac. In my opinion, the service is overpriced at $A 139.95 per year. I can't imagine I'll use it for much more than synchronising my Apple desktop applications, a service for which that price tag seems a bit steep. But anyway, I'll re-evaluate that in 60 days. Next, I synchronised to .Mac from my MacBook Pro, and then back to the Mac Pro. It worked as designed.
5. I installed some essential applications: Quicksilver, Adium, Yojimbo and iWork '08 from the Family Pack I bought a few weeks ago. Interestingly, Yojimbo knew it was licensed as soon as I fired it up—is this stored on my Keychain? iWork didn't. Even better, Yojimbo can synchronise via .Mac, so I set that up.

That largely covered the first migration issue identified above. It was fast and painless.