Leave it to Mark Liyanage to keep us up to date with all that "just won't compile on OS X" software. This time - he's got the latest PHP 4.2.0 ready to go for us, either on his site, or through a simple shell script.

Read the rest of the article if you'd like to use the shell script update method...

Ever wonder what someone ment when they told you to RTFM? Well the answer isn't what you may think it is; it means they wanted you to go to the RTFM ftp server at MIT! They have a HUGE (as in really really big) archive of documents, records, and faqs of usenet resources, etc. One in particular people here might find useful is the Unix FAQ archive.

And have a look around, you'll find a lot more useful stuff there, too. In fact, I dare you not to get lost!

Ever wish the startup messages went by just a bit slower so you could read them? Especially in verbose mode? Then dmesg is for you. dmesg displays the contents of the system message buffer, including the startup messages seen in verbose mode. Just open the Terminal, type dmesg | more and see what went flying by on the screen during your verbose-mode boot. Try man dmesg for a bit more information on how it works.

There's a great program called GNU VCDtools that lets you do many things to VCD's. Buried inside the app is a program called vcdxrip. To get everything right you need a few arguements to have it put out a simple .mpg:

alias vcdrip '/Applications/GNU vcdtoolsX 1.0b.app/
Contents/Resources/vcdxrip --no-ext-psd -o ~/.Trash/blah -b'

[NOTE: Enter on one line with no extra spaces; shown on two for narrower display purposes]

Now whereever I am, I can rip a VCD into a mpg. It tosses the XML information into the trash and it doesn't drop out any other input. Nice clean MPEG result.

[Editor's note: I have not tried this myself...]

Last October, I wrote a beginner's guide to installing XFree86, fink and The Gimp on OS X (see this hint). At that time, it was easier to get the 'rootless' XFree86 installation outside of fink. Since October, the situation has changed and fink can now install the latest version of rootless XFree86. After stalling for quite a while, I decided it was time to upgrade my installed version.

Since I had originally installed XFree86 without the help of fink, I had to remove it that way as well. I intended, however, to use fink to install the newest version. Here's all I did to upgrade to the newest XFree86 release:

1. Remove the two existing X11 directories with sudo rm -r /usr/X11R6 and sudo rm -r /etc/X11
   
2. Remove the XDarwin application with sudo rm -r /Applications/XDarwin.app
   
3. Install the base Xfree86 installation with sudo apt-get install xfree86-base (41mb download)
   
4. Install the rootless patch with sudo apt-get install xfree86-rootless (5mb download)

While the guide was useful at the time it was written, the advances in fink and XFree86 have made it much easier to install a rootless XFree86 server. If I were starting from scratch today, I'd simply install fink then XFree86 as shown above; there is no longer any need to install XFree86 separately (unless you wish to do it that way, of course).

[Site administrative aside: Due to a very early morning commitment at work on Wednesday, updates will be published in the evening, Pacific USA time.]

Don't know if you guys know about this mailing list called UNIX Guru - but it is a very nice "Tip a day" sort of list. No BS, ads, etc. I have receivedd it for the past two weeks, and already I have learned a lot I did not know. These are just the sort of tips us macosxhints.com readers love. The kind of stuff you grab and throw in your goodie bag for the day you might need it. You can view the tips and sign-up for the newlsetter here:

http://www.ugu.com/sui/ugu/show?tip.today

PS - I am in no way associated with the list, just a happy subscriber.

[Editor's note: This was mentioned in passing in another hint, but I felt it worth mentioning on its own merits.]

Having trouble with PHP and sendmail on your OSX install? Here's a little help from macos-x-server list:

In the /etc/mail/sendmail.cf file, add the line

 O DontBlameSendmail=GroupWritableDirPathSafe

right after the line

 #O DontBlameSendmail=safe

and this should allow PHP to send mail out through sendmail.

[Editor's note: I have not tried this myself...]

What I really was missing on OS X so far was a small mailchecker. There are several programs for mail checking, but each one I tried takes almost as much RAM as Mail.app, which I use. So I wrote a little script, run by cron, which checks whether there are new mails (using fetchmail) and fires up Mail.app if there are.

Read the rest of the article for the script and installation instructions.

The powerful command-line 'screen' utility (see this hint for help installing screen) can handle multiple "windows" within the same screen session. It's quite like tabbed browsing in Mozilla or the way kterm works in KDE.

To create a new window you press "Ctrl-A c". To cycle forward through the list of windows use "Ctrl-A n"; backward is "Ctrl-A p", and "Ctrl-D" to terminate the screen. Assuming you have 'screen' installed, here's a quick example:

 % screen top
 [Ctrl-A c]

 % screen man tcsh
 [Ctrl-A c]

 % man screen
 [Ctrl-A n] [Ctrl-A p] [Ctrl-A n] etc
 [Ctrl-A n] until 'top' is onscreen
 q [Ctrl-D]
 [Ctrl-D] etc...

Or something along those lines. You don't need tabbed terminal apps after all. =)

Yes, this is documented in screen's man pages. But it's one huge man page and I thought maybe you'd be more inclined to read it if you knew great stuff like this are hiding there.

The standard UNIX (command-line) utility 'diff' compares two text files, showing you the lines which differ between the two. It works well for all UNIX text files, including most of those you will encounter in OS X (e.g. the plist files holding preference information).

But it isn't useful for comparing files which use the traditional Mac end-of-line marker ("\r") since the 'diff' utility, like most UNIX tools, expects lines to be ended with "\n". OS X itself and most OS X applications use "\n" as the end-of-line marker, but some applications which exist in both OS 9 and OS X versions use the traditional Mac "\r" end-of-line marker for their files. An example is iMovie - its project files are editable text but they use "\r" and hence cannot be usefully compared with 'diff'.

All of the above was a long-winded motivation for the following shell script (for use in the Terminal) which provides a 'diff' comparison of two traditional Mac ("\r") files. Read the rest of the article for the script...