OSX Leopard

X11

Lots of useful stuff at Macosxhints.com on X11.

  • I edited my .profile to remove any setting of $DISPLAY.
  • Don't start X11.app directly. Leopard will start X11 if your application needs it.
  • Updated to the latest X11 release at macosforge

Spaces is nice

With it running, press F8 and you can see all your workspaces. Windows can be dragged from one to the other

Mail

  • Searching in mail has become more powerful
  • There is a new version of Growlmail that works properly with Leopard here
  • You can refer to mail messages as a URL, which means you can put links to email in ical entries for example. This article explains how.

Perl

  • After the upgrade I found ptkdb no longer worked. I tried installing it using CPAN but was getting an error due to the none existance of a file /System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/config.h. This file is present in the parallel 5.8.6 version of this directory (after some advise from Google I copied all the contents of /System/Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/* into the 5.8.8 directory (this didn't overwrite any of the 3 existing files). I was then able to compile/install ptkdb.

Time machine

Here's a useful time machine hint

AIPS

See this guide

Making an image of a CD/DVD

1. Insert CD/DVD source

2. Fire up a Terminal, you can then determine the device that is you CD/DVD drive using the following command:

$ drutil status

 Vendor   Product           Rev
 MATSHITA DVD-R   UJ-835E   GAND

           Type: DVD-ROM              Name: /dev/disk1
      Cur Write:    8x DVD          Sessions: 1
      Max Write:    8x DVD            Tracks: 1
   Overwritable:   00:00:00         blocks:        0 /   0.00MB /   0.00MiB
     Space Free:   00:00:00         blocks:        0 /   0.00MB /   0.00MiB
     Space Used:  364:08:27         blocks:  1638627 /   3.36GB /   3.13GiB
    Writability:
      Book Type: DVD-ROM

3. Umount the disk with the following command:

$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1 Disk /dev/disk1 unmounted 4. Create the ISO file with the dd utility (may take some time):

$ dd if=/dev/disk1 of=file.iso bs=2048 5. Test the ISO image by mounting the new file (or open with Finder):

$ hdid file.iso 6. The ISO image can then be burnt to a blank CD/DVD.