Leopard ahoy!

Now that fink has finally started to show some maturing support for Mac OS X 10.5, I’ve upgraded on scud.

I re-used my home directory from Tiger, without any help of migration tools other than chown. Mail.app upgraded its data and so far everything’s gone smoothly.

Managing users has changed a bit: you have to Ctrl+click the account in System Preferences and select “Advanced Options” to change the usual POSIX fields. If you’re serious, check out dscl(1):

 dscl . -read /Users/$(whoami)

Looks like Apple’s Terminal.app has improved a great deal, almost surpassing iTerm. However, it still fails short in the tab apartment: AFAICS Terminal.app’s tab titles always display the process name and don’t respond to the usual xterm escape codes, and the visual style of the tabbar isn’t nearly as nice as iTerm’s Aqua style.

Trying to switch to fink unstable doesn’t work as advertised: you must use the CVS method of selfupdate (rsync being the default).

After Software Updating to 10.5.4, X11.app broke.

1/07/08 4:04:01 PM org.x.X11[12697] /usr/X11/libexec/x11-exec: Unable to find application for org.x.X11

Since Apple’s official updates are lagging by more than 6 months, it’s better just to get it from the xquartz project.

Photoshop doesn’t like case-sensitive filesystems, but there is a (tedious) workaround. I totally agree that this is just laziness on the part of the Adobe devs: it would take 1 man less than a day to do the appropriate case consistency changes given the source code: there’s nothing to break.

launch for Mac OS X

I’m in the habit of keeping multiple profiles under firefox. It means I can have a profile for FF2 (with old plugins that haven’t been ported to FF3), a profile for development with FF3, and one for general browsing with FF3.

Despite their usefulness, profiles seem to be discouraged. The profile manager isn’t shown by default. You have to start the firefox binary with -P to get it up.

Having multiple profiles is great, but under Mac OS X it’s not easy to use them simultaneously. Trying to re-launch an application just activates the currently open instance. Aside from the (wasteful) hack of duplicating the .app directory, how do you open the same application twice under Mac OS X?

The answer is launch. It’s in fink too.

launch -m -a Firefox

Apparently Quicksilver had a “Launch a copy” action that did something similar, but I can’t find it in the current version.