Startup Disk Icons

W

wdavies

Registered
Hi,

Ok, I am rapidly getting up to speed with 10.1 after a couple of years at 8.*

I discovered something that I want to share, and also, to get feedback on.

Like previous versions of Mac OS, you can change the icons of files/disks etc, by doing cmd-I, and the cmd-c and cmd-v. Great for work from Iconfactory for example.

However. OS X protects the "/" of the main startup disk, and no access is allowed. So. How to change the Icon ? Well I found this trick worked -- I have a second volume, which while protected I could unprotect. I then went in as my username, and then sudo cp /Volumes/mydisk2/Icon? / . You can then chmod 777 Icon? to set protections and now the cut N paste works.

There has to be an eaiser way than this -- plus it leaves a horrible NON-invisible Icon File at the Startup top level.

Cheers,
Winton
 
You must be using the UFS file system for your 10.1 installation -- I HIGHLY recommend using HFS+ instead of UFS, unless you have a specific need for the UFS filesystem. HFS+ just does a lot better than UFS for working day-to-day with 10.1.

With HFS+, you can do the ol' Cmd-I, Cmd-C, Cmd-V and change the icons of any disk you please.
 
Hi,

Well I think I have a HFS+ disk -- I did an install of 10/10.1 over an existing 9.0 install (which is HFS+).

A follow up question as you seem to know a lot about the disks -- how can I test disk performance ? I have a java app which does a lot of disk access work -- and it performs half the speed as the same app running on a Toshiba laptop (a 650 mhz).

Cheers,
Winton
 
Well, I'd guess you'd have to use some sort of System Benchmark utility, like MacBench or Norton's System Info or something like that... I'm not too keen on testing disk performance -- it never really mattered much to me as long as the storage medium was reliable.

I'd guess that your slowdowns are due to the fact that it's a Java program. I tend to see Java programs run REALLY slowly under OS X -- more so than under OS 9, and even more so than the same thing running on a Windows box. Don't have a definite answer as to why this is, though...
 
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