cousin girls

I’m running OS X 10.5 Leopard on a G4 PowerBook, and I was having some issues making Macports work.

When i installed from GUI, using the Macports 1.6.0 .dmg version, at the end of installation I got something like “Installation Failed” which I slowly figured out to possibly be due to problems with my bash environment, since it was the post-flight script at the end of the installation process which could not be executed correctly - setting the PATH and MANPATH values is one of its jobs. This got affirmed by my bash environment missing the required settings.

Changing those manually usually is quite easy. On opening a bash shell, the .profile script would be executed. It would contain two Macports-related lines, namely:

export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH
export MANPATH=/opt/local/share/man:$MANPATH

Anyway, this did not work on my system. I miss the .profile file at all, and creating it with the required entries does not change a thing. Leopard seems to have brought some changes that other users were experiencing as well. Actually, there is some posting on this issue, but it’s mainly inconclusive. On my friend’s machine (10.5, Intel) it just seems to work that way. So the problem seems to lie in the fact that different systems can have different bash scripts (~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, ~/.profile …).

That all really confused me. Fortunately, I met the mighty Christoph Lischka yesterday ^^. My problem is solved now, Macports up and running, my mind can peacefully flow over with what I found out:

The bash startup scripts are executed in this order: First, the /etc/bashrc, which is a system-wide setting and which I was recommended not to change at all. Second, ~/.bash_profile. Anyway, the X Windows system evaluates ~/.bashrc first. So here’s what the latter two files look like now:

~/.bash_profile:
source .bashrc

~/.bashrc:
export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH
export MANPATH=/opt/local/share/man:$MANPATH

For a long time, but without success, I tried to get my Wiimote to work as a volume control for my Powerbook G4. The problem with the free software Darwiinremote always was that mapping the volume keys to Wiimote doesn’t seem possible.

That problem is partially solved now. The free software PTHVolume lets you define any other shortcut which can then be mapped to Wiimote using Darwiinremote.

Still, it’s not perfect. PTHVolume misses a customisable shortcut for the option-shift-volume combination which under 10.5 Leopard controls the volume in smaller increments. And, but that’s only an aesthetic issue, you can’t hide the PTHVolume icon from the menu bar as you can do with the normal volume icon.

Anyway, find PTHVolume here, and Darwiinremote here.

Quicksilver for Mac OS X is a launcher very much based on keyboard input.

It works by bringing up an alt-tab-style menu via a definable hotkey combination and a search algorithm for finding items matching your input, which works almost instantly. Define which parts of your system are searched, so it’s fine to just serve for starting applications.

You can get much deeper into it, though. Do not only display applications, but any objects. Do not just launch, but use any other action in an application or on an object. Query an online dictionary for input text. Email a paper to your friend. Do it all with just a few keystrokes.

You can find the freely distributed software here.

Dan Dickinson’s blog presents a lovely introduction to using the code.

Recently, my OS X Leopard system ceased showing to me all the important files on my external hard drive in a spotlight search. A general Spotlight reset did not help, as it only reindexed the system hard drive.

Luckily, you can manually rebuild the index via terminal:

sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/[Drive Name]

Here is links to the Apple manual pages for
mdutil and mdimport

By mdimport you can manually add information on new files and directories to your Spotlight index.