Grex Micros Conference

Item 256: Mac OS X

Entered by rcurl on Tue Aug 3 23:10:12 2004:

87 new of 127 responses total.


#41 of 127 by rcurl on Fri Jan 7 18:25:42 2005:

I mean urls like www-math.mit.edu/~stocker/18354.d/dimensional1.pdf
What do you call them? 


#42 of 127 by twenex on Sat Jan 8 17:28:40 2005:

So, you wanna be able to put an icon in /Downloads that points to
www-math.mit.edu/~stocker/18354.d/dimensional1.pdf? Why not just save it to 
that location?


#43 of 127 by rcurl on Sat Jan 8 19:15:08 2005:

I don't want to save it at all. I am trying to STOP it from being saved.
I just want to read it and go on. That's how it worked with OS 9.2x (and
Netscape 6.x). 


#44 of 127 by twenex on Sat Jan 8 21:51:07 2005:

Oh, OK. I assume you mean pdf's you've "linked" to by putting them in the
Bookmarks menu. I was thinking Unix-style fileystem links, or MacOS aliases
(which afaik are still supported).

Does it happen with other kinds of links, say www.some.com/anypage.html?


#45 of 127 by rcurl on Sat Jan 8 22:20:16 2005:

No, I mean "links" I only clicked on that lead to the download of a .pdf. 
I do not save them as bookmarks or anything else. I DONT WANT TO SAVE THEM
except deliberately. No, .html links are not automatically saved - I can
just view those (or save them if I choose). 


#46 of 127 by twenex on Sat Jan 8 22:22:12 2005:

Hmm, sounds like you need to download/enable support for a pdf reader plugin.


#47 of 127 by rcurl on Sat Jan 8 22:30:53 2005:

I have no trouble reading the .pdf links I click on. I have both Adobe Reader
5.0 and 6.0 (which comes up depends on whether I'm working from OS X or
Classic). The PROBLEM is that the .pdf is saved to the Desktop automatically.


#48 of 127 by gelinas on Sun Jan 9 00:31:28 2005:

The file has to be transferred to your machine before Acrobat can open it.
It may be that previous versions of the browser put the file in the 'cache'
directory, or they might have kept it in memory.  I'd track down the cache
first, and look there. 

The advantage of a 'Downloads' directory is that it doesn't clutter the
desktop.  The advantage of the Desktop is that it is easy to find the ones
you want to delete.


#49 of 127 by rcurl on Sun Jan 9 07:36:41 2005:

You're right. I took a look, and I have many MB of stuff in a slew of Cache
folders, and checking them found web pages I've looked at. I  guess I can't
fight Cache(s), but now the question is why looking at .pdfs puts them on
the Desktop instead of in a Cache. I had looked at the Reader Preferences,
and they don't give one any choices in this regard (that I could find).


#50 of 127 by gelinas on Sun Jan 9 18:30:32 2005:

It's a browser preference.  Look for a 'download directory' option.


#51 of 127 by rcurl on Sun Jan 9 19:45:42 2005:

The only download preferences in Netscape are "Open the download manager",
"Open a progress dialog", and "Don't open anything". Intentional downloads,
however, go to Home automatically, while .pdf (link) downloads go to the
Desktop. It seems to be a OS X preference, but I can't find anything relating
to donwload destinations in System Preferences.


#52 of 127 by gelinas on Mon Jan 10 02:48:49 2005:

Thanks for the hint, Rane: System Preferences, Internet, Web.

 :)


#53 of 127 by rcurl on Mon Jan 10 06:11:58 2005:

???? - is that a path? I don't see it in System Preferences.


#54 of 127 by gelinas on Mon Jan 10 12:22:56 2005:

I wonder if they changed System Preferences somewhere along the line.  I'm
running version 10.2.8.

In 10.2.8, i start System Preferences and click the "Show all" icon.  In the
"Internet & Network" section, I click the "Internet" icon, which opens a
panel with four tabs: .Mac, iDisk, Email and Web.  The last tab identifies
the default browser and specifies were files should be downloaded to, with a
"Select..." button to change that location.

Which version are you running?


#55 of 127 by rcurl on Mon Jan 10 17:49:56 2005:

10.3.5. There is no "Internet" icon in the Internet and Network group,
only .Mac, Network, QuickTime and Sharing. None of these have anything
equivalent to what you describe under "Web".

But it occurred to me that perhaps they moved such preferences to Safari -
and that is the case. If one chooses Safari as one's web browser, one can
choose the download location. One also chooses one's "default" web browser
in the Safari Preferences. I've taken a chance and changed (in Safari),
"Remove Download List Items" from "Manually" to "Upon Successful
Download". Now I'll see if that affects what they call "Safe" files (which
includes .pdf files) downloads. Stay tuned....


#56 of 127 by rcurl on Sun Apr 3 19:00:33 2005:

(I only just now read #55 again. I guess I did that, and it didn't work
for Netscape.)


#57 of 127 by rcurl on Sun Apr 3 19:13:33 2005:

[Mac Help] says you can choose the startup disk (OS 9 or OS X) if you
"hold down the Option key as you restart your computer. You'll see the
available startup disks and can select one." But when I start up holding
down the Option button what I get is a window showing only an OS X icon
and two "buttons", one of which (an arrow in a circle) does nothing and
the other of which (a right-facing arrow)  completes the startup in OS X.  
Is there another way to start up in OS 9? (It is OS 9.2.2 on this
machine.)



#58 of 127 by rcurl on Fri Apr 15 20:40:59 2005:

Hmmm...no  answers to #57. Maybe I'll be luckier with

I learned about OS X "Maintenance" and other stuff from the article
"Prevent Mac Disaster", from Macworld, 2/05. In order to expedite
maintenance I downloaded OnyX. This has buttons for running Maintenance
Scripts (which otherwise would almost never be run, since my computer is
usually not on when they are run automatically), and for "Cleaning"
(deleting log files and caches and some other stuff). The article did not
say, however, if there is any "Maintenance" or "Cleaning" that for some
reason I should NOT do. Not all the categories are self evident. Does
anyone have any do and don't suggetions regarding running OnyX?


#59 of 127 by rcurl on Fri May 27 19:21:29 2005:

Further to the same question in #58: when I run Cleaning on all categories
of files in Onyx, I get one error message, Error 1, which reads

  find: /private/_tmp_/printing.523/Preview of "....[long title]....".

Doesn't anyone else running Mac OS X use Onyx for maintenance and cleaning?


#60 of 127 by rcurl on Mon May 30 19:24:30 2005:

I guess no one runs Onyx....sigh. Mac users might try it, though: free
download.

But let me ask a new question. I am using Terminal to ftp files to a remote
server. I do this with the put command and drag and drop the file into it.
It looks like this:

ftp> put /R/NSS/nss-tnc/index.html 
local: /R/NSS/nss-tnc/index.html remote: /R/NSS/nss-tnc/index.html
229 Entering Extended Passive Mode (|||55412|)
550 /R/NSS/nss-tnc/index.html: No such file or directory

As you see, it doesn't work. However, if I put the index.html file in the root
direction, as /index.html, and then put that, it works. That looks like this:

ftp> put /index.html 
local: /index.html remote: /index.html
229 Entering Extended Passive Mode (|||55433|)
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for /index.html
100% |*************************************|  3827       3.14 MB/s    00:00
ETA
226 Transfer complete.
3827 bytes sent in 00:00 (22.07 KB/s)

What is the problem with putting the file from a deeper directory?


#61 of 127 by twenex on Tue May 31 00:28:33 2005:

You might want to try "cd'ing" to the correct directory. Either use:

ftp> cd /R/NSS/nss-tnc/
ftp> put index.html

or cd to each directory in turn, then put. I've found that BSD versions of
Unix utilities (which is what your Mac uses, and no, it doesn't matter what
"BSD versions" means), are quite limited compared to their counterparts on
Linux. However, you can download the versions used on Linux distros (the GNU
tools) and put them on your Mac. Your mission, should you choose to accept
it, is to read:
http://snow.prohosting.com/guru4mac/opensource_sw_macosx_2k2.html

You may also want to check out the Gentoo on Mac OS X project.
(http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/macos-guide.xml)

(I find gentoo's portage much more easy to use than debian's apt-get. To use
the commandline apt-get tools, you must either know the exact name of the
package you're downloading, or browse through some [imho] unfriendly
text-based and gui-tools. portage puts directories for each of its packages
in directories (under /usr/portage on Gentoo Linux), which you can browse at
your leisure. Interestingly, portage was also inspired by the ports system
from BSD, on which MacOS is based.


#62 of 127 by rcurl on Tue May 31 00:48:02 2005:

Thanks! I think I'll keep it simple, and cd to the directory with the file
(which is simpler than moving the file into the root directory, as I did).
I recall my first procedure working previously, however, so I wonder what
has gone wrong. I don't think I upgraded - although I did clean all
caches. Maybe that lost some links. Is there a cache I should leave alone?


#63 of 127 by twenex on Tue May 31 14:47:38 2005:

Not that I know of.


#64 of 127 by blaise on Tue May 31 16:06:22 2005:

The other answer is to use the extended form of the put command,
specifying different source and target names.

put index.html /path/to/index.html


#65 of 127 by rcurl on Tue May 31 17:32:31 2005:

Too bad "help put" in ftp isn't more informative, like the man pages. 
I'll try #64. 


#66 of 127 by rcurl on Tue May 31 17:39:02 2005:

Re #64: do you mean like ftp> put index.html /R/NSS/nss-tnc/index.html ?
This didn't work. 
Changing directory also didn't work. It gave

ftp> cd /R/NSS/nss-tnc
550 /R/NSS/nss-tnc: No such file or directory

The problem seems to be with the specification of the root directory as /.
Is there a more specific way to specify the root?


#67 of 127 by blaise on Tue May 31 20:48:26 2005:

Is /R/NSS/nss-tnc the path to where the file is on the Mac or where you
want to put it on the server?  If the former, then you need to use 'put
/R/NSS/nss-tnc/index.html index.html'; if the latter then you first need
to create the subdirectories.


#68 of 127 by gull on Tue May 31 20:56:16 2005:

Re resp:61: aptitude isn't too bad for browsing apt packages.  dselect
and taskselect suck mightily.  Dependency handling is still sometimes
confusing, though.


#69 of 127 by twenex on Tue May 31 22:46:06 2005:

Actually, I prefer synaptic. In my experience, when you uninstall stuff with
aptitude, it also uninstalls a ton of stuff you DIDN'T want uninstalled along
with the stuff you *did*. If I were in to such monstrous bogosities, wouldn't
I be running Windows?


#70 of 127 by rcurl on Wed Jun 1 00:44:43 2005:

Re #67: I think the point you raise is where the problem is. ftp> is on
the server to which I have "ftp'd", so that most commands apply to the
directory at that server. However drag-and-drop of a file in Mac OS X is
*supposed* to make the root directory referenced to the Mac directory. It
does, in fact, do this, if the file is in the Mac root directory. However
the problem is that a path instruction is not followed. That is, ftp> put
index.html works if I first put index.html in the Mac root directory, but
ftp> put /R/NSS/nss-tnc/index.html doesn't, even though the path from the
Mac root is properly specified.

I think I mentioned that ftp> put /R/NSS/nss-tnc/index.html index.html
did not work. Here, let me try it again...

ftp> put /R/NSS/nss-tnc/index.html index.html
local: /R/NSS/nss-tnc/index.html remote: index.html
229 Entering Extended Passive Mode (|||60791|)
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for index.html
100% |*************************************|  3827     211.26 KB/s    
00:00 ETA
226 Transfer complete.
3827 bytes sent in 00:00 (23.46 KB/s)

HEY! It worked this time. What the heck.....

Well, if this has solved the problem, then I thank you heartily.


#71 of 127 by twenex on Wed Jun 1 14:28:32 2005:

Ah.

No worries.


#72 of 127 by gelinas on Sun Jun 5 09:40:39 2005:

In #60 above, you report that

        put /R/NSS/nss-tnc/index.html

doesn't work, with the error, "550 /R/NSS/nss-tnc/index.html: No such file or
directory", and in #66, you note that

        put index.html /R/NSS/nss-tnc/index.html

didn't work, either.  Note that in both cases, the remote path is the same as
the Mac path: "/R/NSS/nss-tnc/".  I don't know which remote machine you are
using, but it seems unlikely that it would have a directory named
"/R/NSS/nss-tnc/".

I find the report that

        put /index.html 

worked to be curious:  Do you have 'write' access to the root directory on
the receiving machine?  More importantly, where did the file end up on that
machine?


#73 of 127 by rcurl on Sun Jun 5 17:51:15 2005:

I noticed that also, that that path is not on the remote machine. It seems
to be a syntax problem. It appears it has to be <put [path/file] [file]>,
not <put [file] [path/file]>, as first suggested here.

I am already connected by SFTP to the ultimate directory on the remote
machine when I drag and drop the file I want to transfer. Given that ftp>
<put [path/file] [file]> works, I too am a little suprised that just put
/[file] works if the file is in the Mac root directory. Maybe I don't need 
the file name in the path, but it doesn't hurt? I'll try that:

ftp> put /R/NSS/nss-tnc index.html 
local: /R/NSS/nss-tnc remote: index.html
/R/NSS/nss-tnc: not a plain file.

Nope. The file name has to be part of the path. 





#74 of 127 by rcurl on Mon Jun 20 20:07:35 2005:

Is there a way to turn off the "suggestions" (prior urls) window that
comes up when entering a url or site ID at a site you have previously
visited, in Firefox? I couldn't find such an option in Preferences.

This annoying feature (to me) is worst on some sites that require your ID
and PW, and the suggested ID list obscures the PW entry box, so you *have*
to use the list to continue.



#75 of 127 by juicy on Thu Jun 30 00:32:36 2005:

This is the menu layout in NS 7.0; FF should be similar but may not be
identical:

Preferences > Smart Browsing > Location Bar Autocomplete

If you don't want it to suggest anything, ever, uncheck the box; if you want
adjust the options, hit 'Advanced'.

If you're getting suggestions for information you're entering into forms
within pages, look for Privacy > Save Form Information and tell it not to;
you may also want to "Clear" saved information.  Note also that if you just
keep typing, as the options for completions narrow, the list'll get shorter.
You should also be able to use the arrow keys to select an option and either
tab or enter to select it and move on to the next box (or not).


#76 of 127 by rcurl on Thu Jun 30 05:42:02 2005:

(I though I had responded...but it's not here, so...) Thanks! I had not
thought that the form information preferences would be under Privacy. I
shouldn't have assumed anything when dealing with such applications.


#77 of 127 by twenex on Thu Jun 30 10:38:20 2005:

But I thought the Mac was supposed to be intuitive and easy-to-use...


#78 of 127 by gull on Thu Jun 30 14:12:05 2005:

The OS usually is.  Third-party apps aren't always.  Mozilla/Netscape,
like most open-source apps, isn't really known for a consistent and
well-thought-out user interface.  Menu options even sometimes move
around between minor releases.


#79 of 127 by rcurl on Thu Jun 30 15:43:00 2005:

Don't go overboard. The Mac OS X Help is pretty poor, not having explanations,
or even definitions, for many terms and procedures. 


#80 of 127 by twenex on Thu Jun 30 17:42:22 2005:

 The OS usually is.  Third-party apps aren't always.  Mozilla/Netscape,
 like most open-source apps, isn't really known for a consistent and
 well-thought-out user interface.  Menu options even sometimes move
 around between minor releases.

Don't throw that "like most open-source apps" around TOO much. M$ changed
plenty between Windows 95 and 98, and between 2000 and XP, both minor
upgrades.

As for "third party apps aren't always", i thought there were supposed to be
Human Interface Gidelines, too...


#81 of 127 by juicy on Fri Jul 1 01:52:58 2005:

sure there are, but when different programmers with different views on the
most usable or intuitive layout work successively (and often without much
communication) on a design, it'll change.  Eventually it'll stabilise, but
it may take a while.

And don't be too sensitive about finding meaning where there wasn't any. 
"like most open-source apps" doesn't exclude closed ones, it just means that
it's common among open ones.  it's probably just as common among closed apps
with similarly large communities of uncommunicative developers.


#82 of 127 by twenex on Fri Jul 1 10:48:28 2005:

True enough.


#83 of 127 by gull on Tue Jul 5 20:20:01 2005:

Also, remember that Mozilla was originally written for Windows, then
ported to the Mac.  That usually entails some compromises.  It's hard to
satisfy the UI guidelines of both operating systems, especially since
people tend to expect an app to work the same on different platforms.

Open-source apps are getting better at UIs, but they have a ways to go.
 GNOME certainly is better than it used to be.  GIMP has improved
considerably in the 2.x releases; it used to be a great example of what
*not* to do.


#84 of 127 by twenex on Tue Jul 5 20:41:38 2005:

 Open-source apps are getting better at UIs, but they have a ways to go.

I think closed-source apps are getting worse. Mac used to have one interface
paradigm (two if you include desk accessories, which even before multitasking
could coexist with the single application on screen). Now it has two (three
by the latter criterion.) Add another for apps written by Microsoft (which
I hear always diverge from the Mac HIG). And another for text-based apps (such
as Terminal, telnet programs, and non-IDE-based programming tools).

As for Windows, there's one interface for (Windows) Explorer and one for My
Computer. Add another for Media Player. And another for WinAMP...

Since its inception, DOS/Windows has had no fewer than 9 major or minor
interface changes, including:

The change from tabbed to overlapping Windows in version <3.1

The addition of DOS Shell in DOS 4

The change to Program and File Managers in 3.x

The change to My computer and Explorer in 9x/NT 3.51 and up.

The cosmetic (but imho awful) change in Windows XP;

The cosmetic (and slightly nicer) putative change in Longhorn.

The ditching of components in Longhorn.

The addition of an allegedly decent command line shell in Longhorn;

The constant (and progressively stupider) interface changes in Control Panel.

Oh, AND some time soon, the change to a database filesystem.

Of course, KDE and GNOME have undergone various changes, too. But it's no
worse than Windows. Finally, MS have compounded the error by allowing you to
change to something that looks vaguely like the old interface at each turn,
and then keeping those options around. MS software is anything but simple or
consistent, unless you have been brainwashed into thinking it is, which they
seem to have been able to do with most people with an alarming degree of
success.


#85 of 127 by rcurl on Wed Nov 23 21:00:34 2005:

Returning again to #59 inre the Cleaning function of OnyX.... the complete
error message I get whenever I run it is

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Error: 1

find: /private/_tmp_/printing.523/Preview of A video that never mentions 
Heifer Project International shows why their premise is wrong - An Aticles 
From The Heifer Project- A Bad Approach to Solving World Hunger Problems - 
An All Creatures Animal Issues Article Series- justi#14D6A.prvw: No such 
file or directory

find: /private/_tmp_/printing.523/Preview of A video that never mentions 
Heifer Project International shows why their premise is wrong - An Aticles 
From The Heifer Project- A Bad Approach to Solving World Hunger Problems - 
An All Creatures Animal Issues Article Series- justi#14D6B.pset: No such 
file or directory

find: /private/_tmp_/printing.523.1/ Preview of A video that never 
mentions Heifer Project International shows why their premise is wrong - 
An Aticles From The Heifer Project- A Bad Approach to Solving World Hunger 
Problems - An All Creatures Animal Issues Article Series- 
justi#14DF3.prvw: No such file or directory

find: /private/_tmp_/printing.523.1/ Preview of A video that never 
mentions Heifer Project International shows why their premise is wrong - 
An Aticles From The Heifer Project- A Bad Approach to Solving World Hunger 
Problems - An All Creatures Animal Issues Article Series- 
justi#14DF4.pset: No such file or directory

find: /private/_tmp_/printing.523.2/ Preview of A video that never 
mentions Heifer Project International shows why their premise is wrong - 
An Aticles From The Heifer Project- A Bad Approach to Solving World Hunger 
Problems - An All Creatures Animal Issues Article Series- OK

--------------------------------------------------------------------

It appears that "Cleaning" is trying to find some files that are
not there. But why does it think they are there? Or am I misinterpreting 
what the error message is trying to tell me? I certainly don't need/want
any files about "The Heifer Project".

I can find the directory /private/_tmp_/printing.523.1/ (etc), and it
contains all that gibberish, but why is this creating an error? 




#86 of 127 by arthurp on Wed Nov 30 09:40:21 2005:

Seems like the file name may have special characters in it that are not
being properly handled by the cleanup script.  If I have a file named

"-rf /"

and I can get some administrative task to pass that as a command line
input to the 'rm' command, we have something to look at.  If the admin
task correctly tokenizes my file name, then the 'rm' program will remove
it.  If the admin task fails to correctly pass it, then I may be able to
get the task to recursively '-r', forced '-f' remove files starting at
'/'.  A huge problem.  I leave it as an excercise for the reader how to
create a file named "-rf /".


#87 of 127 by rcurl on Wed Nov 30 17:30:13 2005:

I'm not even sure what of that is a file name. If I go to the last directory,
say printing.523, and list it, I get

[Rane-Curls-Computer:/private/_tmp_/printing.523] ranecurl% ls -al
ls: Preview of A video that never mentions Heifer Project International shows
why their premise is wrong - An Aticles From The Heifer Project- A Bad
Approach to Solving World Hunger Problems - An All Creatures Animal Issues
Article Series- justi#14D6A.prvw: No such file or directory
ls: Preview of A video that never mentions Heifer Project International shows
why their premise is wrong - An Aticles From The Heifer Project- A Bad
Approach to Solving World Hunger Problems - An All Creatures Animal Issues
Article Series- justi#14D6B.pset: No such file or directory
total 0
drwx------   4 ranecurl  wheel  136 30 Nov 12:18 .
drwxrwxrwt  11 root      wheel  374 22 Oct  2004 ..

So, what is all that gibberish starting with ls: Preview.... ? It certainly
isn't files in the directory. 

Do you think it would resolve the problem (with that directory) if I
emptied it? If so...how do I do that? It's not as those are files I can rm.
As far as I know, I don't even need those directories "printing.523.x".


#88 of 127 by arthurp on Fri Dec 2 09:42:02 2005:

If you go to _tmp_ and try to 'rm -rf printing.523' it probably says it
can't remove the dir because it's not empty?
Have you done an fsck on this?
From inside printing.523 does 'echo *' show anything?


#89 of 127 by rcurl on Fri Dec 2 20:16:32 2005:

Yup, it says it isn't empty. 
echo * inside printing.523 yields   tcsh: echo: No match.
I don't  know how to use fsck in this circumstance. 
Is there a way to empty a directory from outside it? 


#90 of 127 by gull on Tue Dec 13 20:59:04 2005:

rm -r directoryname 
 
If it complains you may also need the -f switch, which overrides some 
safeguards.  (The "f" stands for "force.") 
 
I'm a little suspicious that printing.523 isn't actually a directory, 
but rather a file that has become marked as a directory due to some 
kind of filesystem error.  In UNIX, directories are just a special type 
of file. 


#91 of 127 by rcurl on Wed Dec 14 02:02:27 2005:

I took this discussion to agora as there is a bigger crowd there. So I
have tried rm -rf <directory>. Didn't work. But if printing.523 *isn't*
meant to be a directory, how do I make it what it was meant to be (a file).
Here is an ls of the directory in which it is:

drwxrwxrwt  11 root      wheel  374 22 Oct  2004 .
drwxr-xr-x   6 root      wheel  204  7 Sep 23:54 ..
drwx------   3 ranecurl  wheel  102 21 Oct  2004 .KerberosLogin-501
drwx------   3 ranecurl  wheel  102 21 Oct  2004 501
-rw-r--r--   1 root      wheel  652 21 Oct  2004 mcx_compositor
drwxrwxrwx   3 root      wheel  102 21 Oct  2004 printers
drwx------   4 ranecurl  wheel  136  2 Dec 15:06 printing.523
drwx------   5 ranecurl  wheel  170 22 Oct  2004 printing.523.1
drwx------   5 ranecurl  wheel  170 22 Oct  2004 printing.523.2
srwxrw-rw-   1 root      wheel    0 21 Oct  2004 slp_ipc
drwxrwxrwt   7 root      wheel  238 22 Oct  2004 tmp

There appear to be five directories created recently (Oct 2004), but
I don't know how. Only the printing.523.x directories show up as error
when cleaning with OnyX. The one in question got modified in some fashion
while I've been fooling around with it so it has the recent date (but
I can't tell you what specific action did that). I  presume "root" are those
created on an installation (I may have upgraded to OS 10.3.9). 


#92 of 127 by gull on Fri Dec 16 05:05:33 2005:

I assume you've already run a disk check?  (I don't know what OS X calls
it...probably Disk First Aid.)


#93 of 127 by arthurp on Fri Dec 16 07:59:32 2005:

fsck won't want to run on a mounted file system.  I don't know how to
tell OS X that it should force an fsck on next reboot.  On my linux
there is /.autofsck to control this.  Also shutdown(8) has a switch to
force it.  I suspect man 8 shutdown should be your starting point.


#94 of 127 by rcurl on Wed Jul 12 18:28:30 2006:

Re #s85ff: I solved the problem, with help from 
http://forums.macosxhints.com/index.php. The problem was that the long 
garbage after the find: in #85 above isn't *in* the file, it is the *name* 
of the file, which choked OnyX. What I finally did was sudo'd the folder 
_tmp_ to my desktop, renamed the files with the long names, moved them to 
trash, and emptied trash. It did not work to empty trash without first 
renaming the files. I could then sudo _tmp_ back into its directory (for 
whatever good that is - everything seems to work find without it there).


#95 of 127 by rcurl on Wed Jul 12 18:36:32 2006:

New problem: is there any way to stop OSX from sorting files in a folder 
alphabetically? Usually I like files alphabetical, but this time I 
transferred the contents of two digital camera cards to the desktop, and 
wanted to append the files in one to the end of the list of files in the 
other. The file (image) names were, however, overlapping between the two 
cards, so when I copied and pasted, the files got mixed in, since the 
automatic file naming on the two cards significantly overlapped. In fact, 
I am not even sure the files on the one card appeared in the folder on the 
desktop in their original order. (I had taken the camera battery out to 
recharge it, which caused the file naming on the card and date to change, 
and I forgot to reset the date for a few images.)

SO... how do I transfer the files from the card to a folder on my desktop, 
and append files from two cards, keeping their original order? Or, in 
general, how can I create a folder so the files are in the order I place 
them there rather than being automatically alphabetized?


#96 of 127 by gull on Wed Jul 12 21:38:23 2006:

You can probably sort by date instead of by filename. I'm not sure how 
to do it in OS X, though.  It may be as easy as clicking the column 
heading.


#97 of 127 by rcurl on Thu Jul 13 02:14:17 2006:

Whaddayouknow! It works! Why isn't that in Mac Help? But this still doesn't
solve my problem totally. I would like the files in the same order as on the
card *regardless* of the name or date or whatever associated with each. For
example, for the images for which I had not reset the date, it was recorded
as the date the camera was made (or thereabouts). 


#98 of 127 by gull on Fri Jul 14 17:47:20 2006:

I don't think you're going to be able to preserve the file order when 
copying from once device to another.  Even on a single device it's not 
always consistent.  For example, on a DOS filesystem, if you delete a 
file in the middle of the directory, the next file you create may very 
well take that "slot" and end up in the middle.


#99 of 127 by rcurl on Fri Jul 14 18:58:32 2006:

Pretty crumby design.... One should have the option to set the default 
file sort for every folder or volume. However I am getting around the 
problem by downloading the camera card with the camera software: this 
renames all the files in an order corresponding to the order on the card - 
which is not automatically sorted by the camera. However downloaded the 
files from the two cards (to separate folders) both start with PIC00001. 
Now to try to append one onto the other....


#100 of 127 by rcurl on Mon May 21 16:37:26 2007:

How does one save the configuration (SSID and WEP) for future connection 
of a Mac laptop to a wireless base station? 

I can connect, but could not find the way to save the configuration for 
later connections.


#101 of 127 by gull on Wed Aug 22 16:54:08 2007:

Let it add the info to your keyring.


#102 of 127 by rcurl on Wed Aug 22 18:53:09 2007:

How is that done? If you can tell me, I can try it the next time that Mac 
laptop is available to me (in a week or so).


#103 of 127 by gull on Wed Aug 22 18:59:15 2007:

It's been a while since I did it, so I don't remember.  I think it was a
checkbox or a dialog query when I first signed on the the secured network.


#104 of 127 by rcurl on Thu Aug 23 05:32:32 2007:

I looked for that but nothing was apparent. 


#105 of 127 by rcurl on Wed Sep 5 19:47:05 2007:

A game application that I used now and then stopped working. When clicked 
on, the icon "exploded" as usual, and a spinning wait icon appeared, but 
then everything stopped and the app did not open. Thinking the app had 
gotten damaged, I download a new one, but that did exactly the same thing. 
Therefore the problem appears to be in my OS 10.3.9 system.

I therefore downloaded the 19.3.9 installer again, and ran it. I had 
expected that it would give me a dialog because I was reinstalling it on 
top of the same installed system. But it went ahead, and installed it. 
However doing so did not help the game app to work: it failed to open in 
exactly the same manner.

In hunting for info on the Apple site for reinstallation, I found mention 
of reinstalling with an "erase and install", but no explanation or 
instructions for that.

Should I have done something different to reinstall a fresh copy of the 
system?


#106 of 127 by rcurl on Fri Sep 7 18:31:06 2007:

Further to #105: my cosole.log file contains the following after I try to upen
the subject game:

Mac OS X Version 10.3.9 (Build 7W98)
2007-09-07 14:01:26 -0400
2007-09-07 14:02:46.905 MahJong Solitaire[359] AppKitJava: uncaught 
exception NSInvalidArgumentException (*** -[NSCFDictionary 
setObject:forKey:]: attempt to insert nil value)

2007-09-07 14:02:46.905 MahJong Solitaire[359] AppKitJava: exception 
= *** -[NSCFDictionary setObject:forKey:]: attempt to insert nil 
value

2007-09-07 14:02:46.906 MahJong Solitaire[359] AppKitJava: 
terminating.

Does this offer any clues as to how I could correct the fault?

I have discovered from further reading that reinstalling the 10.3.9 
upgrade does not replace the current System, and whatever bug there is in 
it that causes the problem. I need to use an install disc, which could do 
an "archive and install", a function not in the upgrade. I can buy such an 
10.3.5 install disk on Ebay, and then would have to upgrade and update to 
10.3.9 with downloads.


#107 of 127 by rcurl on Sun Oct 7 20:46:47 2007:

(Must not be many Mac users listening in here. But just in case.....)

Does Mac OSX "Tiger" (10.4) support the Classic interface? I am running 
10.3.9, which does, but I could not find any mention of Classic (9.2.2) in 
the Tiger user's guide.


#108 of 127 by nharmon on Mon Oct 8 12:20:52 2007:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't "Classic Interface" really a
dual-boot setup?


#109 of 127 by rcurl on Mon Oct 8 14:09:16 2007:

Not sure what "dual boot" means, but one can choose the startup sys in the 
System Preferences in OS 10.3. Also, in OS 10.3, if one starts an OS 9 
app, "classic" starts up automatically. There is also a OS 9 menu in the 
menu bar. Does OS 10.4 have those?


#110 of 127 by gull on Mon Oct 8 19:15:32 2007:

10.4 supports the Classic environment on PPC Macs, but not on Intel Macs.


#111 of 127 by rcurl on Mon Oct 8 19:45:07 2007:

Thanks!


#112 of 127 by rcurl on Sun Dec 21 06:49:44 2008:

Terminal in Mac OS 10.4 under File has an Open choice where ssh and sft 
servers can be saved after being created in Connect to Server. I just 
discovered that OS 10.5 doesn't have that option, and you choose a server 
in a menu in Connect to Server. In setting up servers in that menu I made 
some mistakes, but these were saved too. I'd like to delete them. How can 
I do this? 

I did notice that the most recently used server goes to the top of the 
list, so bad ones eventually settle to the bottom, but there must be some 
way to remove those bad ones.


#113 of 127 by rcurl on Wed Dec 24 20:41:28 2008:

Well, here's another OS X question: In Alpine on Grex I would like to select
a URL viewer. In Setup there one may make a choice but entering the path to
a viewer after URL-Viewers = .....  How do I write the path to a particular
viewer application in Mac OS X?


#114 of 127 by rcurl on Thu Dec 25 17:02:40 2008:

Or can that only be done if I'm running Alpine ON the Mac? 

Here's a puzzle I encountered on a MacBook running OS 10.5: I was using 
Terminal to connect to a UM server and copying URLs from messages in Pine 
to paste to Firefox. I was going between Terminal and Firefox in the Dock. 
At some point in going back and forth I noticed that the Terminal icon in 
the Dock was showing the name Firefox, but it was bringing up Terminal, so 
I didn't think much of it at the time. However after the computer had been 
shut down and restarted, Terminal had disappeared from the Dock - and, 
apparently, from the computer! Find found nothing called Terminal. This 
seemed strange so I ran Disk Utility (everything was OK) and thought I 
would have to reinstall Terminal. But in the middle of the night it came 
to me that perhaps Terminal had gotten renamed and, sure enough, in the 
morning I found it in the Utilities folder but with the name Firefox! 
Renaming was easy and things were back to normal.

How did Termenal get renamed Firefox while I was swiching between the two 
applications?
?



#115 of 127 by rcurl on Sun Mar 29 06:08:51 2009:

Any Mac OSX users around here. Questions don't get answers. Trying again
anyway, since the Adobe online support system is useless unless one has a
support contract.

I created a bunch of PFD of images in a HP scanner. Adobe Acrobat 9 will open
them, but Adobe Reader 9 will not. Or rather, it opens them as a solid gray
page.

The PDFs created by the scanner are in PDF ver. 6.x, so I tried using the
Optimizer in Acrobat to make one "compatible" with Acrobat 9, but this did
not help the Reader to open the PDF. Suggestions? 


#116 of 127 by rcurl on Tue Mar 31 05:07:58 2009:

Sure is lonesome around here....

But I found the solution....Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader are incompatible.
If I want Acrobat available for its editing and other functions, Reader must
not be installed. Adobe doesn't tell you this anywhere, as far as I could
find. They could even build an automatic warning in the software to tell you
if both are installed....but no. I got conirmation of this by a long google
search with a variety of search terms. 


#117 of 127 by arthurp on Thu Sep 10 04:43:41 2009:

Wow, that is silly about reader/acrobat...

No pretty quiet around here.  It's not like the old days.

Got a real strange look from someone the other day while wearing my grex
shirt.  I had to explain that there was a time before IM.


#118 of 127 by rcurl on Sun Oct 4 05:43:43 2009:

I ran the Sophos 7.0.5 Anit-Virus scan on my OS 10.4.11 laptop and 
received the following errors:

New volume detected at /
Error: corrupt file at: /Applications/Parallels Desktop.app.
Error: threat detection engine found an unrecognised file format at:
/Applications/Stuffit Install/StuffItStandard2009.dmg.
Error: corrupt file at: /Applications/MacLinkPlus
Deluxe.app/Contents/MacOSClassic/MacLinkPlus Modules.
Error: corrupt file at: /Users/ranecurl/Documents/Parallels/Windows Vista.pvm.
Error: corrupt file at: /Applications/Papers.app.

Can anyone tell me what "corrupt" means in this regard? 

I do have Windows Vista, which can run under Parallels, installed. This 
might be seen as a corrupt Mac file (?). The other stuff is all OSX.


#119 of 127 by arthurp on Tue Oct 13 07:00:00 2009:

Sounds like reboot and run the file system check tools.


#120 of 127 by rcurl on Tue Oct 13 19:23:17 2009:

I had not run "fix permissions" first in Disk FirstAid. Next time I will 
do that before running the virus check.

But, what might the scan consider as "corrupt"? That was my question.



#121 of 127 by rcurl on Thu Jan 14 22:01:22 2010:

I've been backing up a MacBook on a wired LAN with Mac G4 using 
Retrospect. I've done this several times, but suddenly I get a "client 
not visible on network" dialog. I get this with the MacBook connected to 
the LAN ethernet hub with different cables. I've run the Disk Utility on 
the MacBook - and the MacBook firmware has also been updated. The 
MacBook will print to a printer on the LAN. I also cannot conect 
directly to the MacBook from the G4 anymore, as I could before to share 
files (the connection attempt times out).

What should I look for to fix this? 


#122 of 127 by arthurp on Thu Jan 21 06:21:32 2010:

How are your IPs assigned?  Static or DHCP?

From command prompt you can try to find the hardware address of each
machine.  In Linux the command is /sbin/ifconfig.  Probably the same for
you.

If the IPs are similar except for the ending part try to ping A from B
and B from A.  You may be able to determine something with the 'arp'
command after the ping.  If there is physical connectivity between the
machines and the IPs are correct there will be an arp entry.  If there
is a problem like a deaf or mute card/cable/port, then you will likely
end up with a blank or incomplete arp entry for one of the directions.


#123 of 127 by rcurl on Thu Jan 21 21:32:54 2010:

DHCP. Thanks for the suggestions. 


#124 of 127 by rcurl on Sun Mar 7 06:00:22 2010:

I took the MacBook to the Apple Genius Bar at Briarwood and they (eventually!)
found out that its firewall had been turned on. Neither my wife or I
intentionally turned it on, but sometimes when new virus software downloads
there is a dialog about security. One of us may have hit the wrong button.

However this only allowed me to make a file sharing connection to the MacBook
from the G4. Retrospect would still not make a connection. Therefore I
uninstalled Retrospect (and its client on the MacBook) and installed an
upgrade. SUCCESS. I think what happened that at some time in the past, perhaps
with a firmware upgrade on the MacBook, the Retrospect client on the MacBook
was made inoperative. 

So all is sunshine again....except the CD drive on the G4 doesn't work
anymore. Sigh.


#125 of 127 by rcurl on Sun Mar 7 06:05:59 2010:

New question: 

We have a CD-ROM that we would like to copy on the MacBook. It is 
protected in some fashion. The original opens a video menu after the CD 
is inserted and one can view an assortment of videos. We burned a copy 
of the CD but the copy does not open to the menu, though it appears to 
have exactly the same files (unless it has hidden files). How can we 
hack our way past the copy protection? I can open any of the files on 
the disc in Terminal for editing (which will show hidden files), but I 
don't know what I should look for.



#126 of 127 by rcurl on Mon Mar 8 23:13:21 2010:

Problem solved. I discovered the "DVD Ripper". That's after I looked up the
file extensions - .VOB, .IFO and .BUP - to see what they are. This led me to
discover that I have iMOVIE and iDVD on this computer: undiscovered (or at
least unvisited) worlds...


#127 of 127 by rcurl on Sat Apr 24 05:12:01 2010:

How can I print to a printer on ethernet from OS X Terminal? lpstat or lpq
don't find any printers on the network. I get an "Unable to connect to server"
error.


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