I work in the Information Technology industry. I’ve had a computer since I was 14, which means I have 17 years of actual experience with PC hardware and operating systems. This also means that I’ve enjoyed/suffered each operating system release from Microsoft and other vendors.

DOS 1.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, 98, 2000, 2003, XP… I’ve used them all. And on day one when each of these operating systems were released I always wanted the OS to do more or there was something I didn’t like about the OS.

Not so with Windows Vista. All my old hardware and cards are fully supported; most of them with brand new Vista drivers and all my new hardware (including an edgy PhysX card) works flawlessly under Vista. The same goes for most of my software and those that don’t work (no more than 3-5 programs) are 6-7 years old and they deserve a refresh anyway.

My nephew, who doesn’t know the first thing about computers, took my advice and purchased a PC with Vista Ultimate pre-installed. He really likes it and thinks it much better than XP. Much easier to use, he says. Setup only took about about 90 minutes, including the time to take the machine and monitor out of boxes and connect everything up and get the Internet connection running.

I’m not in love with any computing device, and I tend to be very critic when it comes to features and ease of use. All I want is for it to work for me every time I turn the machine on. For Vista I can honestly say that it does this and a whole lot more. I must admit I didn’t expect it to so this came as a nice surprise.

First off, the “I” in the title does not refer to me; it refers to my coworker Jenny Walsh. Jenny was recently setting up a new Macbook Pro with Leopard on it and ran into a snag with PIL. Running setup.py for PIL for the first time said that she had no jpeg support. So, she installed libjpeg and tried again. This time, it said that she had jpeg support, but then it threw this error:

ld: in /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/local/lib/libJPEG.dylib, file is not of required architecture for architecture ppc

She tried compiling libjpeg and followed suggestions she had found from across the interweb including compiling as a “fat binary” (intel and ppc), but she still had the same level of unsuccess as before. Finally, in a fit of hacking frenzy, she removed all “-arch ppc ” from
/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/config/Makefile,
re-ran setup.py for PIL, and all was right with her world again.

In trying to diagnose and help her with her problem, I stumbled across
this
blog post. They didn’t seem to have any trouble getting PIL and libjpeg installed on leopard. The compiled libjpeg as follows:

wget http://www.ijg.org/files/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
tar zxvf jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
cd jpeg-6b/
./configure
make
sudo make install-lib

I tried the same thing on my laptop (which runs Tiger and not Leopard, btw), and it worked for me. But this just took my PIL installation from saying that it did not have jpeg support to saying that it did. Jenny was having a different problem. So, if you are having a problem with PIL blowing up when trying to set it up, you may want to give Jenny’s solution a spin. But make sure to make a backup copy of the Makefile.