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  1. O

    how do you uninstall?

    If it was installed as a Package, your system saves details on every file it installed. There aren't yet good gui tools to acsess this information and automate uninstalling, but the foundations for such a thing are there. If comfortable with the commandline, you can access this information...
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    When will Apple OS be compatible with standard graphic cards ?

    The problem isn't with the OS, it's actually a cpu design issue. When Intel (and Intel-style) CPUs access memory, they use a different byte ordering than essentially all other CPUs. Since AGP cards access system memory directly, they need to use the same byte ordering as the CPU. Thus, the...
  3. O

    How to burn .iso files on a Mac?

    And should you be curious, the commandline answer to this question is "hdiutil burn {filename}".
  4. O

    Communicating with the clipboard at the command line

    Unfortunately, narrowing the window in which people can read your sensitive information is a fairly limited solution. Even a second or two is all the time in the world for an automated attack. And this still doesn't address the even more alarming issue of random users being able to modify or...
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    can you use the GNOME and KDE packages from a linux CD on X11

    I'm afraid that the answer is vastly closer to "no." If your CDs include source (not binary) packages, and you have a darwin binary of rpm to install them, and you have a C compiler installed, then you could, with some difficulty, manually recompile the necessary packages. It would be a...
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    Communicating with the clipboard at the command line

    Unfortunately, there is a single, globally readable and writable clipboard. Which is to say, yes, there is a huge security hole. Unprivileged users can use tools like this to view whatever is on another user's (including root's) clipboard. Worse, another using writing anything to "their"...
  7. O

    squid web proxy starting at startup

    Take a look in /System/Library/StartupItems, and you'll see all the various things osx starts at boot. You can copy one of those, and just make the obvious changes to run squid. To do it entirely correctly, you'll actually want to create /Library/StartupItems, and put your new item in there...
  8. O

    OSX vs Linux

    If you're just looking for accessibility of unix tools and behaviours, osx is a great choice. Its differences from linux aren't really much greater than the differences between any of the other systems people call "unix". However, you may find that osx has one huge downside: it has a strong...
  9. O

    Could this be the heart of new Macs next year?

    Um, IBM's idea of a "lower-end system" is probably higher than anything Apple has ever offered, or is likely to anytime soon. By "low-end", they probably mean something with as few as sixteen processors, and costing as little as a few hundred thousand dollars each. The POWER line of cpus are...
  10. O

    Apple's X11 and virtual desktops

    You want CodeTek's Virtual Desktop ( http://www.codetek.com/php/virtual.php ). Multiple desktops were the one thing I sorely missed from X11, and this product provides them perfectly. They do want a bit of money for it, which I found to be entirely worthwhile.
  11. O

    Trying to use rsync to backup to a Firewire drive?

    By default, rsync only copies regular files. Directories are not considered regular files, so it skips them. The one really magic option for rsync is -a, "archive mode". Which essentially means "do all the sane things I'd want you to do by default anyway." With -a, you can skip the -ptogD...
  12. O

    dots in front of files not showing up

    Yes, this is an old unix convention for "slightly hidden" files. It's not intended to provide anything like security, just to remove the clutter of things you probably don't want to see most of the time. Using Tinkertool or similar will allow you to access those files on extant CDs. Don't...
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    Compile time...I'm confused...

    Much of the problem is that you're building binaries for different architectures. Binaries for risc instruction sets tend to be 70-100% larger than those for cisc instruction sets, and compile times are correspondingly longer. And no, I don't believe that any version of gcc uses altivec for the...
  14. O

    Which PowerBook G4 do you like?

    Having just handled a minibook in an Apple store, I didn't find it to be unusually warm. Admittedly, it was just sitting there idle, not encoding and burning dvds or anything exciting like that. While I like the ancillary features of the macrobook (lit keyboard, firewire 800), I refuse to...
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    Let's all click the Bug-Button

    I continue to be astonished that anyone finds tabs to be even tolerable, much less desirable. They invalidate the entire premise of a windowing system. Even worse, they do it on a per-application basis; something so fundamental as discrete windows should not vary from one application to...
  16. O

    10.2.3

    The Terminal.app binary is changed, but the til article makes no mention of it, and I don't see any immediate differences. Does anyone have any extracurricular knowledge of what might have been changed there?
  17. O

    Does the Finder break permissions rules?

    Well, this is a somewhat unavoidable limitation to using a shared/public account for confidential information. If you want the data to be more secure, use an actual user account. There are a couple of non-obvious ways that unix permissions interact with directories. Read permission on the...
  18. O

    ssh version?

    Those are version numbers of the ssh protocol supported, which vary separately from the version of the actual software in which they're implemented. There are two versions of the ssh protocol in use today: 1.5, which is very old, and contains some integral security flaws, and 2.0, which is...
  19. O

    SCP Client??

    There are many good scp and sftp clients. Transmit looks particularly good. As is the case for just about any other software need, what you really want to do is ask http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/ about "scp", and possibly "sftp".
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    swapping/paging on 10.2.2

    Swap is stored as files, in /var/vm. I don't believe there's an explicit limit on total vm size, other than the obvious constraint of free disk space. vm_stat and vmmap will probably also prove useful.
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