In my quest to move away from WordPress (and PHP/MySQL, which reminds me far too much of 1999 for my comfort), I'm evaluating several static site blog solutions to migrate this blog to and to use for a couple of other blogs that I want to set up for next year. As part of the process, I wanted to give Octopress a shot. Octopress is a static site blogging solution built on mojombo/jekyll – the solution that powers GitHub Pages. The beauty of it is that you can simply deploy your blog to GitHub Pages, and even use a custom domain, simply by pushing to your repository (GitHub will pass your repository through Jekyll automatically–simples!)

The problem is that there are apparently issues with installing the dependencies on a box running Lion with Xcode 4.2. The following solution worked for me. I hacked it together from that StackOverflow thread as well as the Octopress Setup Guide:

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I was following Cory Bohon's instructions at Mac|Life for downgrading your iPhone to OS 3.1.3 when I ran into a little snag while trying to install libusb in the first step: the installer would hang on the "Preparing to install…" message.

Since libusb is a simple library, installing it manually isn't difficult and the files you need are already in the libusb.pkg file. To install them:

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OS X Leopard comes with Python 2.5.1 and lacks the PIL package for image manipulation. Google App Engine's local SDK uses PIL to emulate its image manipulation features.

The instructions on Google's installation page for PIL are incorrect.

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