More than two years after acquiring my G3 iBook, I'm going to restart with a clean slate. I experimented a lot with it and probably borked some settings I shouldn't have. I'm especially suspicious of the Darwin-level hacking I did at the command line. Even though it runs perfectly fine, I'm still going to take the time to install a fresh copy of Mac OS X on it, just to be sure.

Why not just upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, you ask? Well, I'm hesitant. I need my Mac to do important work. While I have faith in Apple to deliver a quality product I'm still going to wait until at least 10.4.1 before I start using Tiger. Call me cautious, but I don't have the time or interest to deal with quirks.

Besides, all of the documentation for using tools on Mac OS X hasn't been updated and refined for Tiger yet, while Mac OS X 10.3 Panther is a well known beast. I'll let the early adopters do their thing and visit Tiger when the time is right.

Here's what I've done so far...

0. Backed up all of my data on my new external hard drive.
1. Installed Mac OS X 10.3 Panther from CD, erasing the old install.
2. Right after it booted, I was prompted to update to 10.3.9.
3. Installed Mac OS X Xcode Tools from CD.
4. Installed DarwinPorts.
5. Updated DarwinPorts:
   sudo port -d selfupdate
6. Added some environment variables to ~/.profile:
   export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin
   export MANPATH=$MANPATH:/opt/local/share/man
   export INFOPATH=$INFOPATH:/opt/local/share/info
7. Installed Readline, Ruby and RubyGems with DarwinPorts:
   sudo port install rb-rubygems
8. Installed Rails:
   gem update
   gem install rails
9. Recovered my entire 10 gigabyte iTunes music library by replacing the empty iTunes folder in my home directory with a backed up copy from the previous install. This is the way backup recovery should be.
10. Recovered my iCal calendars the same way.
11. Installed Quicksilver.
12. Installed FireFox, set as default web browser. Why do I have to open Safari to do this? It should be in System Preferences.
13. Installed VLC.
14. Installed Subversion:
   sudo port install subversion
15. Installed MySQL 4:
   sudo port install mysql4 +server

...in progress