Thinking that I would have more control by setting up the packages by myself, I was wrong. After running into the problem with pre-installed PHP by MacOS X Leopard does not have GD, IMAP and other components, I tried playing with fink, MacPorts and manual compiling. LAMP still rules and not “MAMP” for good reasons. Although Mac is quite dev-friendly, it still takes hours searching and setting up. I find the binaries under Linux/CentOS (eg: yum install/update php-gd) much easier to deal with.
I guess I learned from the process but it would be much simpler to go with XAMPP. The conf files are in one place, easy to find and getting it up and running is really simple. If you plan to have a dev environment, don’t bother with the manual installation that can take hours. Now this Mac is ready for some development.
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