For discussion of and questions about Mac OS X.

127 responses total.

I have Mac OS 10.3.2 running with "Classic" OS 9.2.2,  and use both (and also
have a lot of stuff created under 9.2.2). But my question is about the
Macintosh HD window, where two (out of dozens) of folders are highlighted.
That is, there are colored bars running across the whole line for those
folders. One is highlighted red, along with all the apps in the folder
(all games antedating even OS 9) and the other is highlighted yellow,
and contains mostly recent folders and files. My question is, why are
just these two folder-lines highlighted, and how do I turn that off?

Is this the OS X Finder or the Classic finder?

Sounds like you (or someone) has attached Labels to them. It's about 12 years
since I've used a Mac, but iirc they can be turned off by selecting the
"Labels" Item in the Special menu, or by selecting the Icon and choosing "Get
Info" [or whatever the item is now called) from the menus.

That is correct for the Classic (OS 9) Finder; OS X no longer has Labels
and I'd need to know what View mode he's in to figure it out further.

I suspect the colors mark applications that are not fully compatible with
the Classic environment: Yellow for those that may run, with problems, and
Red for those that won't work at all.  But I've not been able to confirm this
with the OS X Help.

I stand corrected; thanks.

This is always - OSX or Classic. All the red highlighted apps run (in OS
9).  The contents of the yellow highlighted folder are just files, not
apps, and a similar collection to that found in lots of the other folders
in Macintosh HD.

When you say that they run "in OS 9", do you mean when booted into OS 9 or
do you mean in Classic when booted into OS X?

Both.

OS X _^Hd^Hd_^Ho^Ho_^He^He_^Hs^Hs support labels.

Select a file or folder.  Click on the cog in the 
toolbar.  Select a label from the menu.  If you
don't have the cog in your  toolbar or don't have
a toolbar, control-click on the item.  You can
also do this from the finder menu, but I forget
exactly how at the moment.

It sounds to me like Rane's items have labels.

That did it! Thanks. Color Label is under the File menu in OS X.
Control-clicking is what first produced a menu including Color Label - my
search in MAC Help didn't find Control-click for me. (Another "mystery" I had
was that the alphabetical order of items in a list were inverted, and the
little button for inverting it isn't on the window. I discovered that clicking
on the Name panel did it - by accident.)

Mac OS makes things easy to do, but finding out about features is
sometimes harder than it should be.  OS X help is not as good as
OS 9 help was yet.  A lot of the links cause searches, instead of 
going directly to something.  This can be slow and generally finds
the same stuff I did when I started.  I remember having to look and
look to find out how to change a file's icon, and that was Before
OS X, and 9 for that matter.  It is easy, but you would never find
out how by experimenting.

I have been using MacSSH for a ssh client that is required to access the
CAEN servers. However it only runs under OS 9 (or Classic). In poking
around the web I found a mention of using Terminal on OS X - which is how
I am connected now (with ssh1). I would like, however, to save connection
bookmarks - the information in the Connect to Server window. I found the
Terminal Help to be pretty unclear. How do I create a list of connections
with the settings for server, ssh1 or ssh2, and user ID? (Also the same
for the other clients, telnet, ftp, sftp.) 

Also, is there a full ftp client available under terminal that doesn't require
that I recall all those ftp commands again?

There are helper applications to handle managing SSH info for Terminal.
 I personally use iTerm as an alternative to Terminal, and because of my
extensive non-GUI experience and weird memory don't bother with
connection lists.  (All of the systems I connect to have the same
username, so "ssh servername" at an OS X command prompt does the trick.)
 I haven't found a GUI FTP client yet; the sftp client I use is Fugu.

I'll look into that. However, I have managed to save a server list in
Terminal. The problem was that Terminal Help said to save the servername.term
in Library>Application Support>Terminal, but there wasn't such a folder.
Turns out I had to create it myself - duh!

How to I copy a [local path] to a file on my computer into the put command
in SFTP in a Terminal window? I need to do this to upload a file on my
computer to my directory on a unix server via ftp. 

If you aren't in the directory with the file, put the path in quotes, because
it's likely to have spaces:

        put "Documents/Microsoft User Data/My Letter" my-letter

I get the error message

File "Macintosh HD/Personal Folder/Recipes/Blueberry Pie" not found.

What is the top directory on my Mac (OS-X)? That is, from where do I start
the path? 

If it were really the root, you'd need a leading slash, not the disk name:

        "/Personal Folder/Recipes/Blueberry Pie"

However, I'd try

        "Personal Folder/Recipes/Blueberry Pie"

"/Personal Folder/Recipes/Blueberry Pie" works! Thanks!

Terminal Help in OSX is no help at all. It finds nothing for SFTP, for
example, even thouse SFTP is a built in Terminal function. I also thought
there would be a way of selecting the file from a menu or drag-and-drop
in Terminal. Terminal Help does suggest there is, but gives no examples,
and everything I tried like that failed. 

Here is what Terminal Help says about dragging and dropping into Terminal:

   To display a directory path at the insertion point, drag the directory
   (or a file in the directory) to the Terminal window. For example, if
   you want to change your working directory to a directory named
   "Feedback" on your desktop, type cd with a space after it, then drag
   the Feedback directory from your desktop into Terminal. You'll see
   this: 

   [hostname:~] yourname% cd/Users/yourname/Desktop/Feedback

   Press Return and Terminal changes to the Feedback directory.

When I do this with the file Blueberry Pie, dragging and dropping it into the
sftp>put Terminal window, it enters as

   sftp> put /Personal\ Folder/Recipes/Blueberry\ Pie 

This is a variation on the format that works, but of course it doesn't.
Does this suggest how one can successfully drag/drop the path into the
Terminal sftp window? 

The backslashes are supposed to escape the spaces, the same way putting
them in quotes would.  I don't know why it doesn't work; it's possible
sftp doesn't recognize backslash as an escape character for some reason.

Hmmm....can I change that to what sftp understands? There is a section
"Creating custom control sequences in Terminal" in Terminal Help. 

Hey! I just modified the drag-and-drop by adding quotes, i.e.,

   sftp> put "/Personal\ Folder/Recipes/Blueberry\ Pie"

and it worked! That's not much of an imposition. 

sftp is not built in to Terminal.  Try "man sftp" at a command prompt.

I'm  not sure what you mean. I am using Terminal in Mac OSX. In Terminal,
there is File>Connect to Server> service choices of ssh, sftp, ftp and telnet.

Then choosing File>Connect to Server>sftp should do it, or at the prompt
type "man sftp", which brings up the man[ual] page for sftp.

"man sftp" at a sftp> is am invalid command. however "help" at the sftp>
prompt provides a list of possible commands and their effects (in a few
words). No "man" pages appear to be available, per se. 

However "man sftp" at a new shell prompt does produce the usual detailed
man pages. (Now I have to look back at this thread to recall why we want
to know this....sort of like man pages themselves....)

OK - I did sort of wonder where the man pages where. The top response to
asking Terminal Help for "man" is "Learning about Unix commands". Fair enough.
Usually Terminal Help has no help for terms you might expect to find in a
glossary. 

I've been trying to get a USB printer connected to my G4 (OSX) to work
from an iMac (OS9). I been through the OSX Help page "Sharing your USB
printer with Mac OS computers", which then directs you to the OS9 Help
for "Using a shared printer". What it tells me is that I have to "preselect"
the printer in the iMac on the USB Printer Sharing control panel.

So I open USB Printer Sharing on the iMac and click on Network Printers
tab. However the printer on the G4 is not there, so (following the Help
instructions) I click on Add. Two "neighborhoods" are listed in the Select
Shared Printer window, but opening neither produces a printer to
"preselect". In this case I am supposed to "confirm the neighborhood" by
clicking on a link in OS9 Help called <Set my network neighborhood>. This
produces an error dialog "File SLP Preferences wasn't found". However said
"SLP Preferences" file IS in the Preferences folder.

There is an "Add Neighborhood" button in the Select Shared Printer window,
but that opens a dialog into which one is supposed to enter, I presume,
the name of a neighborhood to enter. I've tried several things, like the
name of the G4(OSX) computer, but nothing works. There is no Help in Mac
Help for the "Add Neighborhood" dialog. At this point I'm stuck. Any
suggestions? 

Does the OS 9 system have the "USB Printer Sharring Extension" installed
as well as the Control Panel?  Also, you need to goto the OS X Sharing
Panel in System Options and turn on printer sharing.

As I remember the "USB Printer Sharing" stuff on OS 9 lets you share a
priter connected to that computer via USB with other computers.  You
want to go the other way around.  What happens when you run the chooser
on the OS 9 system?

Yes, there is a "USB Printer Sharing Extension" in OS 9. I tried with OS X
Printer Sharing either on, or off with Classic running - the OS X "Sharing
your USB printer...." Help page says "If you turn off printer sharing in
Max OS X, you can still use the USB Printer Sharing control panel in the
Classic environment to share printers".

Selecting the printer in the OS 9 computer Chooser (the driver is
installed there too) does not bring up the printer connected to the OS X
computer. 

I search Yahoo groups for "SLP Preferences" and found another person that
got the "File SLP Preferences wasn't found" error when trying to add
a "neighborhood" - and the solution: upgrade Applescript. Running 
<Set my network neighborhood> now says the neighborhood is "Local Services".
There was already a "Local Network" neighborhood listed in the USP Printer
Sharing>Add dialog. This appears to just be a bit of confusion thrown in
by giving the same thing different names in two dialogs. Unforunately,
fixing <Set my network neighborhood> didn't allow me to preselect the
printer.

What finally did, however, was running Rebuild Desktop in Classic Preferences
on the G4(OS X). Now opening Local Network on the iMac(OS 9) USB Printer
Sharing > Add, produced the name of the USB printer on the G4, so I could
choose/preselect it, and it appeared in the iMac Chooser when the USB
printer icon was chosen. I went to bed happy....but the next day discovered
that even though the Chooser on the iMac chose the USB printer on the G4 -
I could still not print to it. The error was given as -6982, but that's
not helpful as it is just means "USB abort". 

The problem is the same whether the G4(OS X) is running the Classic
enironment, or not. It looks like I am running out of options.....

I updated OS 10.3.2 to 10.3.5 (available over the web) hoping that its
claimed updates to USB functionality might solve the problem of printing
from a OS9 computer to a networked printer on an OSX machine. Even though
the printer shows in the OS9 machine's Chooser, printing still fails. 
(There is quite a bit of discussion of this in online groups - but no
solutions, as yet.)

Here's new OSX questions: 

When using the Disk Utility, one has the options to Verify or Repair
Permissions or the Disk.

Q1: Why would one want to Verify instead of just running Repair, since
they take about the same amount of time? 

Q2: Is it better to repair Permissions or the Disk first, when running
these as general maintenance?

Q3: Why are there Permissions to repair after installing most software,
even the Apple automatic updates?

Guesses, since I don't run OS X:

Q1: Sometimes it's a good idea to see what's going to be changed before
you allow the changes to happen.

Q2: I would repair the disk first, then the permissions.  The reason is
the disk repair could potentially change the file structure that the
permissions are going to be applied to.

Q3: Maybe they aren't paying enough attention to permissions in their
update code?

When I click on a .pdf on a website in Netscape 7.1 I am not only shown
the document but it also places a copy on my OS 10.3.5 Desktop without my
using "Save". This didn't happen in OS 9.2.2. Is there a way to stop it
from doing this? I can't find any preferences in Netscape or OS X that
seem to apply.

Slightly OT: Does anyone know of a good, reliable source for used or
refurbished Mac laptops?

I don't, David.

I use Safari, which doesn't offer the option of not downloading PDFs.  That
is, the files are automatically downloaded and then opened by the appropriate
application.  I have them stored in /Downloads rather than Desktop, though.

Downloads are another matter - they end up in Home. I  don't know if I can
control that either. It's "linking" to .pdfs that puts them in Desktop. 
I would  prefer to download to the desktop and not save "linked" .pdfs at
all unless I choose to. After a session of hunting around for information on
a topic, scanning .pdfs, my Desktop gets totally jammed with them. 

How do you choose where "linked" .pdfs end up? If I could just put them in
a folder on Desktop, I wouldn't have the jam-up problem. 

I seem to remember a preference for this in earlier versions of Netscape.
Unfortunately (for you), I don't currently have a copy installed.  (Nor am
I likely to, since Safari meets my needs.)

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