Something strange happened when I upgraded to 9.1, in my OS X partition, all of the of the .app folders, show up as files now. if I control click on them, it shows the show package contents selection.

Sorta Strange? I didn't notice this fact on any of the recent posts.

The boot image (the picture you see at startup) is held in /System/Library/Core Services/Resources/BootPanel.pdf. To replace it, simply create your own 640x480 PDF file, name it BootPanel.pdf, and save it to that same directory. You may want to make a copy of the existing screen first, of course!

If you want to 'cd' into some folder that's buried sixteen levels deep on your hard drive in the terminal, there are two ways to do it.

The hard way is to type:

cd path/to/very/deeply/buried/folder/on/your/drive

Of course, you could also do this one line at a time. Either way, you'll end up typing quite a bit.

The easy way is to navigate to the folder in the finder with point-and-click. Type 'cd [space]' into your terminal window, and then drag and drop the folder from the finder into the terminal window. The full path will be displayed, and you can then just hit 'return' and the command will be executed.

You can also use this trick for files; if you want to compress something with 'tar,' just type 'tar [options-you-want] [space]' and then drag the file to compress into the terminal window and hit return. Very nifty, and very Mac-like!

"Oneota" posted instructions on how to change the system font in this MacNN forum. It requires a copy of PrefEdit (findable on macosxapps), and a couple of easy edits. If you mess up, the font change is simply ignored, so you won't cause any real trouble with your system.

This hack only works in Cocoa apps, so it won't help at all with the Finder or Explorer. Things like OmniWeb and TextEdit, though, should work just fine with your new font.

[Editor's Note: See the comments for the answer to the question]

I would love to be able to configure which application is launched to open documents of various types (html, .gz, etc). Is this possible?

[Editor's Note: See the comments for a discussion on the possibilities of remote control of Aqua sessions]

Hi!

I would like to know if anyone has successfully run Aqua-Applications on a remote machine (like one can do under X-Sessions if x-forwarding is allowed).

Thanks for any info on this.

ralf

If you run SSH on OS X PB, there's a new report on a number of websites of a security hole in versions under 2.3.0. You can either attempt to install OpenSSH 2.3 (available from the OpenSSH web site), or you can disable the SSH1 protocol, which is where the security hole exists.

To disable SSH1, start a terminal session, enter su and your root password, and edit the file /etc/sshd_config. You may want to back it up first (cp sshd_config sshd_config_old), just in case. Change the line that reads #Protocol 2,1 to simply Protocol 2. Remember to take out the '#', otherwise the line is still commented out! Save your changes and exit the editor.

The last step is to generate a host DSA key, while still logged in as root. Type ssh-keygen -d and wait for the prompted save location. Type "/etc/ssh_host_dsa_key" as your response, and then enter two "return" keystrokes when asked for the passphrase.

Now either 'kill' and restart sshd, or restart the computer, and you should be good to go. If you had been using NiftyTelnet SSH (an SSH1 client) to connect to your box, it will no longer work. You'll have to use MacSSH, which is an SSH2 client ... or just use the UNIX command line, if you're coming from another OS X or UNIX box.

If you'd like to see an example of multi-language support in OS X via OmniWeb, first download the Code2000 unicode font (which contains something like 30,000 characters). Unzip the file, and move the .TTF font into your fonts folder (/Users/username/Library/Fonts).

Launch OmniWeb, and open the font preference panel and select "Code2000" as your font. Now visit Alan Wood's Unicode Sample Pages to see a selection of unicode characters for various languages and purposes ... it's a pretty impressive display!

This tidbit was found on the "Unleash your multilingual Mac" page, written by Tom Gewecke. Visit his site for even more info on multi language support in both OS X and OS 9.

Jeff Frey provided a tip in this ResExcellence article on how to add additional highlight choices to the set provided with OS X.

The highlight choices are stored in a plist file buried in your System folder, and this file can be edited (most easily) in OS 9.0, and additional colors added by simply specifying RGB color values and a name.

Check out ResExcellence for the details!

In the interest of thoroughness, I thought I'd post this "world's most obvious tip" on using the dock. You can resize it quickly and easily by dragging on the vertical bar that separates the two portions of the dock - up to grow, down to shrink.

I'm sure every OS X beta tester on the planet knows this one, but it's going into the database so future new users will be able to find it!