So yes, I have it. I called the Apple Store in Fashion Valley and they had one available. So I left work early for a very important errand. I’ve been setting it up all night.

The first order of business of course is switching the thing to a UNIX filesystem instead of HFS+. Not that I detest HFS+, I use it on my iPod. It just doesn’t support mixed case the way I need it to. Next I spent several hours copying files from my iBook so that this thing gets to feeling normal. I had the hardest time getting my iTunes library copied over. Now, I’d really like to iSync my whole iLife suite between my two Macs without using .Mac. I just don’t think it’s necessary to send all of my stuff flung out to the Internet when I’m technically competent to create my own servers. Unfortunately it doesn’t really work that way (at least not yet). I’m going to have to break out my perl-fu and possibly an rsync server or two (hmm, cvs? subversion? arch?) to have everything just sync like it ought to. I ended up just grabing my entire iTunes directory over AFP and dropping it into iTunes on my iMac. I’ll have to re-link my iPod to my iMac. Still too bad it won’t sync.

The radest thing about this switchover, is that after I installed Fink I was able to use dpkg --[set|get]-selections and apt-get dselect-upgrade on Mac OS X just as easily as I’m used to doing with Debian. Ah, I love UNIX.