Meh Blog!

I’ve been pulling my hair out for the last hour, while trying to copy files from my iMac to my Macbook Pro across my network.   continue reading…

Occasionally I need to edit system files that belong to root and I found that it can be quite annoying as I always end up using nano in the terminal as it doesn’t seem possible to elevate the privileges of an application from Finder.  For example if I wanted to edit my /etc/hosts file then usually I’d have to drop to a shell and type:

sudo nano /etc/hosts

The problem with that is that I have a nice looking graphical operating system here and although I love the fact that it uses unix under the bonnet, I really much prefer to edit my files in TextEdit rather than a console based application like nano.   continue reading…

I was trying to get wine working on my Mac.  It’s been erroring about something or another so I ran winedbg to see what it was complaining about.  The last function on the callstack seemed to be in the libcrypto.0.9.7.dylib library in the /usr/lib directory so in my infinite wisdom I renamed it to see if it was loading a different one from somewhere.  Big mistake…

I was left in a position where I could no longer sudo to rename it back.  I had no luck from Finder either and I couldn’t open new Terminal sessions.  I decided to reboot in safe mode by holding down shift while rebooting to see if I could repair the damage from there but my system just wouldn’t come up – I was left staring at the Apple logo.

In case you should ever find yourself in this position, don’t panic too much – After much panicking myself, I managed to fix it by doing the following.  Bear in mind at the time of writing I use Leopard so things may be a little different in future OS X versions.

• Locate your OS X installation disk 1 and pop it in the DVD drive.
• Reboot while holding the C key down to force your Mac to boot from the DVD drive.
• It’ll load up and ask you what language you’d like to use.  Pick one (preferably one you can understand lol).
• The next screen is all about reinstalling.  That’s a last resort really because we can fix things from here.  On the Utilities menu you should see Terminal.  Choose it and the Terminal will open with a bash shell.
• Bear in mind that you’ve not booted from your hard disk so the directory structure will look different to what you’re used to.  Change directory in to /Volumes and then in to your hard disk, possibly called “Macintosh HD” unless you’ve changed it.
• Now you’re actually looking at your hard disk and should be able to change directory in to usr/lib and mv the file back to it’s original name.  Just to clarify, you should not be in /usr/lib.  You should be in /Volumes/Macintosh HD/usr/lib.

Good luck!