If you want to enable automatic login on Mac OS X remotely you can to this by using ssh and the niutil command. This requires that you have enabled "Allow remote login" in the System Preferences, of course.
1) Open an ssh session to your Mac.
2) type su to become root.
3) To enable the automatic login, the property "username" must be found by loginwindow in the local netinfo database. Here is how you do it:
Thanks to macosxhints' user 'louisdeboer' for pointing this one out. If you option-click on any of the window widgets at the top left of an application window (most Carbon or Cocoa apps, it seems), it behaves just as though you option-clicked a widget in the old Finder - the action is passed to all open windows. Want to minimize all of OmniWeb's open windows? Just option-click the minimize button. Similarly, option-click the close button, and they all close.
Check your software update panel ... I just installed it, and I'll post back details after I restart!
OK, here are the details. The modified files list seems to indicate that there have been changes to the BSD kernel, ADB I/O, CD storage, DVD storage, graphics I/O, networking, PCI, and a number of other areas. I've posted the whole list in the remainder of the article, in case you'd like to see it (it's not too long).
As for the operational changes, I can't say that it feels much different, but I'll have more to say after I get a chance to re-run my benchmark suite this evening. Apparently it squelches one bug in the Finder dealing with folders with large numbers of items. If you had over some relatively small number (600ish) in one folder, all the Finder would show was 539. They'd be there (you could see them in FTP or the terminal), but the Finder wouldn't work with them.
This one was posted to the X4U mailing list by Dierdre M., and I think it's an incredibly useful tip, so I'm posting it here!
If you want to batch rename a bunch of files (say "foo*.jpg" to "bar*.jpg"), you might think you could just do "mv foo*.jpg bar*.jpg" in the Terminal. However, this doesn't work right since the shell expands each argument before the execution occurs. However, there's a cool way to accomplish the same result with a (more complex) command line argument.
Open a terminal, and "cd" your way to the directory of interest (or just drag the folder you want to work with onto the terminal icon in the dock; it will open in that directory). Once there, we'll run a 'test' before actually change any names. This first version of the command is "proof of concept"; it will output what will happen, without actually doing it. So to rename all those "foo*.jpg" files into "bar*.jpg" files, type:
ls foo*.jpg | awk '{print("mv "$1" "$1)}' | sed 's/foo/bar/2'
This should output a series of "mv" (the unix "move" command, which is used to rename files) lines, each one showing the old and new name for each file affected. If it all looks right, then just pipe the output to the shell to execute:
ls foo*.jpg | awk '{print("mv "$1" "$1)}' | sed 's/foo/bar/2' | /bin/sh
That should do the trick. Dierdre points out that this is an especially nice way to do it, since you get to see what will happen before you commit to it! I happen to agree with that logic completely!
To use this on your own files, you'll need to replace the references to filenames and items to be replaced in both the "ls" and "sed" portions of the script.
With the release of 10.0.2, Apple has included an upgraded FTP server that makes it easier to control which directories FTP users can utilize. This is done using an 'ftpchroot' file, which makes each listed user's home directory appear as the root of the system via FTP, so there's no way they can move "up" out of their directories.
Implementing 'ftpchroot' is quite simple, but it does require a bit of editing work as root. If you'd like to restrict your FTP users to their own directory, read the rest of this tip.
Here is another shortcut (undocumented I believe) I found accidentally for use in a terminal window. Hitting Option-A will clear the screen as would the command 'clear'.
[Editor: You can also use Control-L, which is more standard]
Sometimes, it's the little things. I was trying to replicate an error someone was experiencing involving a large number of files in a directory. So I made my large directory, opened a terminal, then did an "ls" on the directory. Everything scrolled by, and then I noticed that there's no total file or total size information. Size information is easy to get (type "du directory_name"), but how do you know how many files are in a directory in the terminal?
Given my basic UNIX skills, I headed to the "man" pages for "ls", but found nothing useful there. Same thing with "man du". I finally had to use a lifeline and phoned a friend ;-). The answer definitely speaks to the sometimes non-intuitive nature of UNIX, but also shows how you can pretty much make it do what you want by combining commands.
To count the number of files in a directory, enter:
cd directory_to_count ls | wc -l
That's the "ls" directory listing command, the vertical bar (which 'pipes' the output of "ls" to the next command), and then the "wc" word count command with the "l" (lower-case L) option to count the number of lines instead of characters. The output of this command is the number of files in the directory. Subdirectories count as one entry; the files in the subdirectory are not counted.
Of course the GUI is much easier, but if you're connecting remotely via SSH, you won't have that option available!
There have been a couple of help requests for remapping the OS X keyboard. There's very little info out there right now about this topic, but I just stumbled across a bit of evidence that it should be possible, although more difficult than it has been in the past.
Reading the MacAddict forums, I came across a thread called OS X Key Mappings. In that thread, there's an email posted from Marcel Bresnick, the author of "PrefEdit," who also has written some OS X Server 1.x keyboard mapping hacks. Here's a snippet of his response on customizing the OS X keyboard maps:
The * has to be replaced by the respective language name. Every language package contains 32 keyboard maps for _all_ keyboards, so there are in fact 224 (!) keyboard definitions. (This doesn't make sense, looks like a quick hack to implement Macintosh keyboards on top of Darwin...) If you want to do it right, you would have to repeat the keyboard redefinition for all language packages.
He goes on to explain how to edit the files (in theory, not step-by-step). Head on over to MacAddict and read the rest of the Marcel's email for an overview of how the process would work. Warning - this editing is not for the timid, and if you mess up, you'll have no keyboard -- so back everything up first, and make sure you know how to use single-user mode!
I have some older games on my PowerBook G4 that require that the monitor be set to 256 Colors. The Displays settings in OS X do not allow me to switch to 256 colors, so I had to boot into OS 9.1 to run these older games. However, on a hunch, I tried switching colors in the Classic environment's Monitors control Panel, and it switched to 256 colors and the games ran just fine.
Aqua doesn't like running in 256 color mode, but it got the job done!
If you are a little familiar with the new tcsh-shell on Mac OS X, you can have a preview of working with JBuilder [editor's note: JBuilder is a commercial Java development environment from Borland which is due out shortly on Mac OS X natively]
If you have jBuilder and would like to see it running on OS X, read the rest of the article for instructions on getting the Linux version running on your Mac.
