Re: setting up new intel Mac for prepress
"Hard work sometimes pays off in the long term but laziness always pays off now." - Despair.com
Don't do anything. For font management you may want to add Suitcase but that's about it. The G5 has enough muscle to carry a lot of seemingly inane bits transparently. As the MacOSX grows a lot of developers are hooking into OS components to solve their problems and keep their application light. You can actually run into a lot of trouble quick by disabling or turning off components. Besides, OSX doesn't really let you at the tasty bits anyways. God help you if you get crazy enough to try and go into the unix shell and manipulate things there! Great way to get information and fix little file permission problems but Apple really doesn't want people mucking with configs at that level. When it comes to running Pre-press apps. in a PDF or PostScript printing environment The G5's are good to go. Here's a far more practical tidbit.
Load in a second hard drive. Install the factory OS onto it. Keep booting of your first drive and get everything configured right down to the bilges. Then boot off second disk and download "Carbon Copy Cloner". Make a disk image from the raw disk file on drive #1 and store it on drive #2. Go back to living off drive #1. If drive #1 fails just boot off #2 and restore the disk image. Snapshots might be an adequate option but I haven't had an occasion to live test them yet. I know the previously described method will get you back to a fully functioning perfectly configured Pre-press workstation in about 45min. If you're in a real high pressure environment and want to further reduce the downtime, but a 3rd drive and restore the image to that, remove it and store it. You can get back 5 minutes and no tools. Only costs you a few hundred. Sadly, you used to be able to pull this off with the Apple disk utility and a bootable firewire external but that seems to have gone the way of the Dodo with Leopard on Intel Macs.