Find the Previous System Folder, Get Info from the Finder (Command-i), change the owner of the folder to your own account in the Ownership & Permissions section, and then click the "Apply to enclosed items" button. You might have to enter your administrator password to do this, and it could take...
Well, that was... odd... I disconnected my iBook from power like I often do, and carried it into the other room. Soon after it just powered down completely. I had to remove and replace the battery to get it to turn on again. At startup, I noticed the following message reported:
ApplePMU: PMU...
You're probably just going to have to reinstall if the entire /etc directory got blown away. There's quite a lot of system configuration and whatnot that's stored in that directory.
Question: is it safe to remove my iBook's battery while the computer is on and connected to the external power supply? I doubt my battery is affected (I got the computer around Sept. 2004), but it couldn't hurt to check.
I read that Spotlight can be quickly disabled by adding your hard drive to the list of ignored locations in Spotlight preferences (the Privacy tab). Then you can remove it from the list and the index will be rebuilt from scratch. Someone else was reporting that this helped immensely, possibly...
Hmm, interesting. But is there some reason that plain old applications can't do the same thing, i.e. was this not possible until the advent of Dashboard?
Okay, it seems that setting the Finder to show all files causes all the icons to appear disabled. I'm doing it with the usual "defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE" approach. Is there some other way that we have to do it now?
Yeah, like the title says, the column and icon views in the Finder are showing all icons as disabled (i.e. greyed out). List view looks normal. Everything is functioning properly, but it just looks a little odd. Does this perhaps have anything to do with the fact that Spotlight is still indexing...
No, just at the general notion of Carbon. Heh. I always saw it as more of a transitional API for migrating OS 9 apps to OS X compatibility. I'd personally go with Cocoa when developing something from scratch, unless I were already intimately familiar with Carbon (which I'm not), and had some...