Apple has a migration utility for moving stuff from one Mac to another. My PowerBook is going for repairs, so I had everything migrated off to another one, so that I’d have something to use while it was gone.

So I wanted to tell you, my loyal readers, about a little bit of caveat emptor that you might want to know about should you use this utility, and if you’re a Unix geek like myself. You see, I install a lot of stuff via somewhat non-standard means. For example, I have Apache installed, from source, because that’s the kind of guy I am. And I have a variety of other weirdnesses installed in various places – mostly in /usr/local it seems, although there’s probably stuff elsewhere.

You see, if you don’t install stuff in the accepted Apple way, the migration utility doesn’t notice it. So right now I’m manually copying over /usr so that I’ll at least have that stuff. I don’t actually know what else is missing, but I imagine I’ll run into a few things. Mostly, it will be fine, because eventually I’ll get my original laptop back, and all that stuff will still be there, but I expect some pain in the meantime.

The worst thing thus far has been Thunderbird. I don’t know what the deal actually is, but Thunderbird launches and then hangs for a while, then tells me that the security bits didn’t start up properly and that things might not work. So I can’t get to my email. Which is a pretty big deal. Hopefully copying over /usr/lib will help, but who knows?

Alert. Could not initialize the browser’s security component. The most likely cause is problems with files in your browser’s profile directory. Please check that this directory has no read/write restrictions and your hard disk is not full or close to full. It is recommended that you exit the browser and fix the problem. If you continue to use this browser session, you might see incorrect browser behaviour when accessing the security features.

Yes, it says behaviour, not behavior, which I find interesting.