Apple M1/Apple Silicon Day 1 LIVE

Follow up – day 3!

So, overall I’m pretty happy with the 8GB M1 Air. Outstanding issues I have are:

ScreenFlow and some Rogue Amoeba audio apps don’t work – I guess these are doing some clever low-level stuff.
I’m having issues importing my MySQL databases from backup. This is not really an M1 specific issue, apart from the fact that I can’t use homebrew to install anything other than the latest version of MariaDB.

Some useful links that have helped me out along the way:

Status of Homebrew on Apple Silicon
“Sam” has a tip on running command line stuff using Rosetta
A clever person figured out that if you make a copy of terminal (or iTerm) and set it to “Run as Rosetta” it seems to run any sub-commands using Rosetta too.

I’ll have some write ups – or possibly unstructured brain dumps – on stuff I’ve learned along the way.

22:42

Aside: yarn and npm are the one thing that I’ve noticed it REALLY FREAKING FAST on this machine.

22:32

Yes – I’m still at it – in between other things.

So I’d heard from a friend that lib-sass or node-sass – I don’t recall which – maybe both would fail to work.

And that’s true. And it raises a whole weird load of questions about how Rosetta works.

yarn and npm both seem to work OK. But if I understand correctly, lib-sass was a compiled binary, and it refused to run with the usual webpack/npm/webpack barf, including:

Module build failed: ModuleBuildError: Module build failed: Error: Node Sass does not yet support your current environment: OS X Unsupported architecture (arm64) with Unsupported runtime (88)

So why does everything else seem to run fine under Rosetta, but not this one thing?

Anyway, I eventually found a way to:

update node-sass to dart-sass
update the sass-loader (v10 is too high – I get more barf and errors – v7.1 seems to work)
update the sass-loader config

This then all runs under node 15, which I have compiled for ARM/M1. And…YAY!!! I can successfully build the project I need to put live VERY SOON!!!

20:18

Gosh I have a LOT of software!

This is going pretty well considering. HOWEVER… brew and node are pretty confusing.

I’ve basically got brew working, but it’s giving me this nudge to run it with Rosetta which I have no idea how to do.

And I have node v15 installed using brew install -s node (I had to run it a few times to get it to work)

I can’t get the ‘n‘ node version manager to do anything – it’s installed but won’t list or install any versions.

And I can’t get node@10 or node@12 to install with homebrew.

Next up – can I actually compile a project that uses node?

16:28

While pretty much every download-to-your-applicaitons folder app seems fine, the problems are on command-line.

I’ve got Homebrew installed. And seem to have compiled my own version of PHP with brew install -s php, but I can’t get a build of nodeJs to compile.

Perhaps there’s a better way than homebrew for this?

15:29

To be honest, this is going pretty well. I’ve not got some system utilities like Moom, Better Touch Tool, Bartender and the Harvest time tracking app installed. I’ve yet to set them up properly but they all seem to be working.

I also have Sequel Ace for databases and Wavebox for managing some web apps – this is an Electron app and I thought there was issues with Electron. But seems it’s OK!

Dashdocs, Tweetbot and iTerm are all doing fine now too.

Nice that MacOS now has zsh by default but there’s some dotfiles I’ll need to recover!