Vlad Alexa's Blog » macosx

midnight commander for snow leopard

vlad — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:43:18 +0000

Wether you like to have a file manager running as root , need a file manager that can really dig into the guts of the os or are just nostalgic for the good ole 2 pane commanders , either way you got to have mc handy on your brand new 64 bit osx.

There are a number of ways to install it , you can go all out downloading the source and dependences and compile , or take a easy road by means of the macports or fink packages , however there you might find this way the easiest .

Attached to this post is a zip file with the compiled sources, download and extract it to the root directory of /mc , then open a terminal with 5 tabs , type “cd” in each then drag each of the folders to a different tab , press enter in each , then type “sudo make install” in each tab , in this order : gettext > pkgconfig > glib > slang > mc.

That’s all there is to it, delete /mc, now type mc to get your native 64bit mc fix.

: Title: mc
Caption: archive
File: mc.zip
Size: 53 MB

having fun on the network

vlad — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:04:00 +0000

Itunes has a shared library feature but does not show you who and what is it sharing to.So lets start terminal and type :

lsof |grep iTunes |grep TCP

You can also find out what they are listening to by doing

lsof | grep mp3

Now how about for a little fun , say your colleague is listening from a windows machine

nmblookup -A 192.168.0.23

gives you their netbios name , next on use that name with :

echo “Ejoying songname John ?” | smbclient -M THENAMEHERE

shows a dialog like this smack middle in their windows screen

Note that you can send messages like this to any computer you see in finder’s SHARED sidebar , just don’t abuse it , it will stop being funny.

setting up osx as web server

vlad — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:27:00 +0000

By default OSX comes with the industry standard apache web server , only OSX server comes with a mysql server however and none are configured my default for php.

Fortunately enabling both php and installing mysql is trivial on OSX compared even to linux

1 – enable php in apache (basically edit the config file uncommenting php module)

HOWTO :

type in terminal

sudo pico /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

press the down arrow untill you see this line

#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

delete the “#” at the start of the line by pressing right arrow and delete

press ctrl+x

press y

press enter

(you need to use console to edit this file because osx has no way to access that file in a open file window from any program)

2- install mysql

HOWTO:

go and download the package for your architecture and osx version , install it and the pref pane

open System Preferences and click MySQL > Start MySQL Server

open terminal and type :

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root password “MYPASS”

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root -h MYHOSTNAME password “MYPASS”

change MYPASS to what you want your mysql password to be and MYHOSTNAME to the machine’s hostname (it is shown in terminal along with your user name like this [myuser@myhostname:~])

3 – done , you are the owner of a AMP (apache/mysql/php) server , now you can harness the huge amount of free web software running on this ,

as a test that everything worked fine you can install phpMyAdmin as you will probably need it anyway , go to http://www.phpmyadmin.net and extract it to /Library/WebServer/Documents/phpmyadmin

open /Library/WebServer/Documents/phpmyadmin/config.default.inc.php in a text editor

find

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = ‘localhost’;

and replace localhost with your hostname

save the file as /Library/WebServer/Documents/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php

done , open http://myhostname/phpmyadmin and login with user: root , password:what you set before

First Google Chrome for OSX binaries

vlad — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:08:00 +0000

Here it is , the first precompiled version of google’s Chrome browser for OSX , whether you want to test your pages in it , or just take a firsthand look of the development so far on the mac version be aware that this is a very early revision and very unstable , for example it just crashes when loading nytimes.com , most websites i visited work fine however.

You can download it from here (or Chromium.app and TestShell.app individually), inside are two apps , Chromium.app and TestShell.app , they are the Release builds of revision 9854 for Leopard (10.5) of Google’s open source code behind Chrome , which is actually called Chromium.

TestShell.app is just the core rendering view , Chromium.app is the whole app so far but websites do not always load in it and rendering can be garbled , just use TestShell to test pages.

I am not affiliated with Google or Apple and i do not take any responsibility nor imply any functionality of these builds i am making available , have fun.

deleting junk and cache

vlad — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 19:05:00 +0000

For every folder you open in Finder it saves a .DS_Store file in that folder with the window settings , here is a easy way to get rid of them (texts in bold are shell commands to be put into Terminal ) the command recursively traverses all the directories , you can replace all the path with / for a system wide cleanup

find /Volumes/myvolume/mydir -name “.DS_Store” -print0 | xargs -0 rm -v

Like all operating systems there are some caches on osx that you might sometimes want to get rid off , to do so :

rm -rfv ~/Library/Caches/

removes all caches for the logged in user

sudo rm -rfv /System/Library/Caches/ /Library/Caches/

removes some system wide caches

sudo rm -rfv /private/var/folders/

removes Leopard specific cache folders

The osx kernel is a modular one meaning extensions are loaded into it as needed , to speed things up especially at boot caches are made that from time to time you might want to clear

sudo rm /System/Library/Extensions.kextcache /System/Library/Extensions.mkext /System/Library/Extensions/Caches/com.apple.kext.info

dual boot , one itunes library

vlad — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 13:17:00 +0000

Since i started dual booting either Tiger or Leopard one thing that really annoyed me was that i had to deal with 2 itunes libraries , not being able to have the same thing in itunes no matter what i boot into.

Well there is a very elegant and easy fix for that that i am going to detail in this post and it only requires you to have a extra partition besides the ones that you are booting from.

So let’s get to it (texts in bold are shell commands and should be entered via Terminal):

1 – move your itunes library to a partition you do not boot from (i put mine on the Storage partition)

mv ~/music/iTunes /Volumes/IStorage/

2 – boot into each of the os’es and delete ~/music/iTunes if existing and make a symbolic link to the new location in its place

ln -s /Volumes/IStorage/Itunes/ ~/music/iTunes

This works beautifully and it works at some extent for things like Photo Booth too , also tho it might work i do not advise to make the links with Finder , just stick to console.

avi movies in front row and itunes

vlad — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:11:00 +0000

Everyone has those divx movies , you can play them in quicktime given you have the proper codecs like Perian , but the pesky itunes will not add the files to its library.

What we need to do is basically change metadata of files by adding type “MooV” to them , the simplest way to do it is download this applescript droplet i wrote and just drag the files you want fixed on its icon.

A more involved way to do it that needs devtools (found on the install dvd) installed is by entering the bold text below in Terminal , after you modified the path and extension to suit your needs.

find /path/toyour/movies/directory -name “*.avi” -print0 | xargs -0 /developer/tools/SetFile -t “MooV”

Now that you can play those files with itunes how about having them show and play in Front Row from the confort of your remote ??!! , without even adding them to the itunes library , it is just a matter of making symbolic links in your ~/Movies folder to the directories containing your movies , you can use the shell or just alt+cmd drag them to ~/Movies to make the links.

osx and movies

vlad — Thu, 08 May 2008 04:09:25 +0000

OSX is nice , and not because it has no shortcomings , but because you can fix them as opposed to windows.This has a lot to do with the power of osx that stems from it having applescript and a posix compliant shell.

Here is how to change metadata of files so you can play divx movies with itunes for example , with terminal and devtools

find /path/toyour/movies/directory -name “*.avi” -print0 | xargs -0 /developer/tools/SetFile -t “MooV”

, with applescript http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?t=214705

Now that you can play those files with itunes how about having them show and play in Front Row from the confort of your remote , without even adding them to the itunes library , it is just a matter of making symbolic links in your ~/Movies folder to the directories containing your movies , you can use the shell or just alt+cmd drag them to ~/Movies to make the links.

If yo do not know by now you can download movies from youtube just by selecting the file in Safari > Activity > Copy > Paste into downloads window.

How about playing every movie format there is including the flash movies you just downloaded from youtube in anything you like , quicktime , itunes , frontrow etc , well then just download http://perian.org/ and never care about formats of movies ever again.

To top it off i have a script for those times when you do want to know what are your movie files encoded with , this is a extremely fast shell script , with basic info , you can get it packaged as a osx app to drag folders to or directly as a cross-platform script.

: Title: vlad_videntify.dmg
File: vlad_videntify.dmg.zip
Size: 26 kB

: Title: vlad_videntify.sh
File: vlad_videntify.sh.zip
Size: 4 kB

commands for terminal lovers

vlad — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 15:36:00 +0000

There are some things the interface will just not tell you , or you just need a textual representation for , so here we go (texts in bold are shell commands to be put into Terminal)

open

Apple command , opens a file , just as if you had double-clicked the file’s icon , a wrapper to the os extensions useful in terminal to open a file with the app associated with it.

uptime

17:35 up 31 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0.03 0.10 0.07

Standard unix command showing load and time since boot.

uname -a

Darwin leopard 9.5.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.5.0: Wed Sep 3 11:29:43 PDT 2008; root:xnu-1228.7.58~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

Apple only command showing kernel and os info.

sw_vers

ProductName: Mac OS X

ProductVersion: 10.5.5

BuildVersion: 9F33

Apple only command showing os name version and build number.

lsof

COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME

SystemUIS 119 valexa 9u IPv4 0x2e700f8 0t0 UDP *:*

Dock 107 valexa cwd DIR 14,3 1326 2 /

……………………………………………………………………

Unix command showing list of open files/sockets/connections by running processes

EX lsof -c Dock shows all files open by Dock and sudo lsof -i | grep LISTEN shows all listening server applications running

vmmap

Virtual Memory Map of process 107 (Dock)

Output report format: 2.2 — 32-bit process

==== Non-writable regions for process 107

__PAGEZERO 00000000-00001000 [ 4K] —/— SM=NUL /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/MacOS/Dock

…………………………………………………………………………………

Apple command showing virtual memory of processes , used vmmap Dock for the example

fs_usage

18:05:55.034 lstat /Users/valexa/Library/Preferences 0.000053 fseventsd

18:05:55.036 pwrite F=23 B=0×4000 O=0×00659000 0.000024 mds

18:05:55.434 lstat /valexa/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist 0.000069 mdworker

Apple command showing real time information about all file/network accesses going on (needs to be ran as root)