Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with mac and leopard

It's like a tech question and a bad sitcom plot in one!

Navelgazer — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:51:47 -0800

How do I either recover my Mac OS X password or else get around needing it? Several years ago, my then-girlfriend's father bought a family pack of OS_X Leopard, and gave one of them to me. A year later, she and I were broken up. About six months after that, my computer crashed, and the genius bar had to replace the hard drive and reinstall everything. This means that the update password was lost from memory, and I never knew it and can't easily find out what it might have been (ex's dad installed Leopard himself).

So now I've gone a year without updating and it's starting to drive me crazy. Not only can I not update OS_X, but I can't install any number of things I'd like to either.

Does anyone know how I can either recover what this password might have been, or work around it so that I don't need a password to update?

Much Thanks, and Happy Christmas/Hannuka/Kwanzaa/Solstice/Festivus/Holidays to you.

Formatting Differences in MS Word on Windows vs Mac

spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:35:47 -0800

How consistent is MS Office between Windows and OSX? Will using MS Office on my Mac solve this formatting problem I'm having? I'm have a MacBook Pro running Leopard,and I've been using Open Office to write my papers. It's great. I love Open Office (and love that it's free). When I need to turn something in, I just save it in PDF format, e-mail it to myself, then go to a computer lab, check my e-mail, and print off the PDF document. Perfect.

The problem is that I have a professor who needs some documents turned in via e-mail, and they use MS Word. I can save an Open Office document as a Word file (.doc or .docx), and for plain text formatting that's fine, but as soon as an outline or numbered list is created, things look crazy. It seems fine when I save it in Open Office, and it's fine when I then open that document using Open Office, but if the document is opened with MS Word, the formatting is horrible.

I can buy the MS Office suite for Mac at school using my student discount (it's around $35 I think). If I install that, and use Word to create these documents, will they appear the same when my professor opens them using Word, on her Windows computer?

If there will still be differences then I'll skip the $35 and just keep going to the computer lab to tweak things.

If I save a document in MS Word on a Mac and send it to a person using MS Word on a PC, are there formatting differences?

How do I clean up Spotlight search results

jeffreyclong — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:43:47 -0800

How do I clean up search results in Mac OS X Spotlight Shell scripts, Objective C source files, html document files, c header source files all pollute my search results in Spotlight. Is there any way to tell spotlight to stop giving me those results?

I'm writing a terrible novel and it would be a huge loss if it disappeared

tylerfulltilt — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:31:48 -0800

Help me come up with some sort of automated way of sending a file to myself in gmail. Writing a novel. Paranoid about losing it. Currently backing it up to two different ipods and a thumb drive after each writing session, in addition to saving it on the laptop drive.

I'm also sending the file to myself in gmail after each session. However, this process gets annoying. Is there any way to create some sort of script or macro or something that I can click with one button to automatically open safari, navigate to my gmail account, fill in the fields, attach the file and and send it to myself?

If I'm asking for something ridiculous feel free to say so.
Using an iBook g4 with leopard installed.

How do I eject the Snow Leopard install DVD on a Mac Mini?

keijo — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:42:54 -0800

How do I eject the Snow Leopard install DVD on a Mac Mini? I tried to install Snow Leopard on an older Mac Mini but foolishly did not realise that it required 1GB of memory. The install program informs me of this and then gives options to either "Restore From Backup" or "Restart". There is no time machine backup and if I restart it boots again (and again) from the install disc.

I have tried rebooting with holding down the eject button on the keyboard or the left mouse button to no avail. Thanks for any help in getting the big cat out.

Mac problems with password resetting and broken screens

wile e — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 02:37:07 -0800

Calling all Mac experts out there. I have a tricky one. This is a long one, but if you do have the time I would appreciate taking a look. There is a summary on the bottom for those that are less inclined to read through.

Ok, I have in my possession a Powerbook G4 in my possession. Original owner ran it over with a car. Laptop survived, screen did not. Original owner left it for dead. About a year later, I took it off his hands to work with on an external display. Works great, no irregular functionality.

The catch. I have to use the guest account as the original owner doesn't remember the admin password. So I borrowed a copy of Leopard from a friend and tried to reset the password from there. However since the install disk won't recognize the second monitor, I have to get lucky to pick the correct option to get to the Mac OSX Installer screen. From here I chose the password reset popup, reset the password for the admin account I wanted, and I restarted.

Now heres the fun part, when it rebooted, there no longer is any admin accounts. Only the guest account is available. I go back to the installer page and in the reset passwords dialog, no more accounts show for me to reset the password.

So my only option now is to do a complete reinstall of the OS. Except I do not see how from the installer page, and I without being able to use the external as the primary display I am stuck.

So as a summary:

Powerbook G4 with tiger and a broken screen that has no admin accounts anymore.

Need to either be able to make the external monitor as the primary not in the OS, but permanently.

or

To be able to do a complete clean install of Leopard on the system, with the catch of being done from an external monitor.

Now as a bonus question, if I were to disconnect the laptop screen, unplug it, would the computer default to the external display?

Help me rescue my fonts!

zardoz — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:31:52 -0800

I have a font issue with my Leopard 10.5 iMac. This problem is completely my fault, the computer had nothing to do with it! A few months ago I got overzealous upon finding and downloading a big set of free fonts for mac. I installed the fonts--I forget exactly how many, there were several hundred at least. Since then, though, on random websites and with random programs the font becomes unreadable. There's obviously a conflict but now I don't know what fonts are original and what fonts I added later. Faceslap, I know...

So now I don't care about the new font set, I just want the default fonts only so that I don't have this conflict problem. Is there a way to "revert to original fonts" or something similar?

Cross-Platform Crashing on a Macbook Pro

N2O1138 — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:04:43 -0800

I have Leopard and Windows 7 (7057) installed on my Late 2007 (possibly older, I got it refurbished) Macbook Pro 15". My problem is, every time I boot into either OS, I get a kernel panic or BSOD respectively. The fact that it happens in 2 different operating systems makes me almost positive that it's a hardware problem. Unfortunately, I don't know very much about computer hardware, so I don't really know what to troubleshoot first, and I don't want to void the warranty by opening the case (I plan to take it to the Apple Store if nobody here can solve the problem). Specifically, either operating system will crash about a minute into booting up. I don't think the problem can be too serious because everything graphically looks fine and all my files are intact. This leads me to think that maybe it's a RAM problem, and that it runs out of memory and crashes during bootup. Safe Mode in Windows works fine (I'm using it now), and still reports the correct 2gb of RAM. I haven't done safe boot to OS X yet.

The Blue Screen says
"Uncorrectable Hardware Error" and below it gives the code
*** STOP: 0x00000124 (0x00000000,0x85BAE024,0xF2000000,0x00060151)

If it were just what I'm experiencing on Windows, I might think it was something to do with drivers, but it's on both operating systems.

Mac OSX right click/context menus and "create new document"

jmd82 — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 08:52:02 -0800

How do I make Mac OSX right click/context menus show "create new document" and other awesome options. I love and miss the Windows feature to create a new document from the context menu now that I use OSX. Is there any way to make OSX context menus within Finder utilize this useful feature? Or how can I customize the context menu in general?

Baby got too much back

lukemeister — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 08:53:41 -0800

How can I consolidate all my pictures, music, pdf files, etc. from multiple drives? I have about 10 external drives containing photos and so forth. Different drives contain some duplicates, but the individual drives do not. Say I want to copy the files from DRIVE1, DRIVE2, etc. to UBERDRIVE, which has room for everything. My first thought was

cd /Volumes/DRIVE1; find . -name "*.jpg" -exec cp {} /Volumes/UBERDRIVE/Pictures/ \;

and then repeating the process for DRIVE2 and so on.

I tried this for DRIVE1, and it seems to be really slow. (It's taken 10 hours thus far to find 100,000 jpgs on a new MacBook Pro.) Also, I think my current procedure will overwrite files with the same name, even if they're different files.

Does anyone have a better approach? Thanks!

I'm running Leopard, but I also have machines running Vista, XP, and Fedora 10.

Why is my Mac saying "Segmentation fault" when all I want to do is SSH?

razorfrog — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:03:46 -0800

Running 10.5.6, my mac refuses to SSH to anything and gives the error "Segmentation fault" in Terminal. My Google-Fu has been very unsuccessful so far. Sadly, I have no idea what could have caused it, as I can't tie it to a specific installation of anything. All I do know is that it's very annoying, and my only solution is to restart my computer, and then SSH works for a little while.

I've tried re-installing the 10.5.6 update, as a few searches showed a similar problem happening a few years ago due to an OS update. That didn't do anything.

I'd really love to not re-install Leopard. Any ideas?

nu-Quicksilver

low affect — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 20:06:20 -0800

Where do I find newer builds of Quicksilver? I know there are some newer, non-blacktree versions of Quicksilver getting made. I don't have the time or will to go hunting through forums for them, or to figure which one is most stable and best. What have you found? Is it more snappier than B56? I'm on Intel Leopard.

Why can't my Macbook remember preferences settings?

4ster — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 06:39:26 -0800

I recently had to do an Archive and Install of Leopard on my Macbook, due to the fact that it suddenly got stuck on a blue screen (the irony) on boot. Now, everything seems fine, except for the fact that some of my preferences don't "stick," so, for example, each time I tell the OS to open .doc files with Pages, it works for a day or so, but then, .doc files start automatically opening with TextEdit. Thee are more examples inside. I also notice that no matter how many times I tell Pages to not show the ruler when it opens, the ruler keeps coming back.

All my MailTags keywords are gone, but I think that's a separate issue.

No matter how many times I tell Finder to always show folders as icons and not as a list, eventually, it shows them as a list.

In my MacintoshHD folder, I have a folder called Previous Systems from the Archive and Install, which I was considering deleting, but I'm wondering if the solution to my problems could be in that folder somewhere.

I have repaired permissions several times, and this has not solved the problem.

[BTW, I haven't meant to try to post a number of questions as one question, but I do think that all of these are somehow interconnected.]

Thanks for any insight you can offer.

La Cie external drive failure

gen — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 17:27:01 -0800

Mac, Leopard, La Cie external hard disk drive spins but does not mount. What's my best option for getting data off this drive? I've got an external La Cie drive that won't mount. I've tried 3 of the 4 interfaces (USB 2.0, FW400, FW800) but cannot get this disk to mount. What are my best options for getting this data before retiring this drive?

Is there a good folders comparison tool for Mac?

Leech — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:06:43 -0800

I need a good and fast tool to compare two folders side by side, with the ability of exclude .SVN and other useless files. I've found some ones like Compare Folders and DeltaWalker but I haven't tried these yet. Do you recommend them?

SuperDrive icon is super annoying

BitterOldPunk — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 11:33:51 -0800

Why the mystery icon? Should I eat it? I just upgraded my desktop Mac (2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB SDRAM) to Leopard 10.5.5, attached an external 250 GB LaCie hard drive via USB, and directed Time Machine to back up to the new drive. No problem, works like a charm.

But now when I restart, there's a SuperDrive icon up in the right-hand corner alongside the usual Time Machine, BlueTooth, AirPort, Volume, Date & Time, and Spotlight icons. Clicking on the icon gets me a single grayed-out and unclickable "SuperDrive" menu option. There is no CD/DVD in the drive.

(OK, I just put in a DVD, it played fine, and I can use the icon to eject it.)

Is this just a convenient way of ejecting discs in Leopard? Can I make it go away? (I don't like icons I'll never use cluttering my workspace, and since ejecting the disc doesn't quit the DVD Player, what's the point of this icon?) Apple Help is, of course, no help.

Also, I will accept praise for actually implementing a plan to back up my data after years of saying I'll do it someday.

I don't need no stinking scrollbars.

Venadium — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:20:52 -0800

Why can't I get rid of the Terminal's scrollbar in OS X 10.5? I'm pretty sure I had this figured out in 10.4, but I just noticed today that the scrollbar is back and I can't get rid of it. None of the older tricks work, and the one Leopard-specific one I did find (downloading some App called Deeper) didn't work either.

Just to be clear, I want to get rid of the scrollbar itself, not the scrollback buffer. I understand one of the earliest ways to get rid of the scrollbar was to just set the buffer to 0 but that's not what I'd like to do.

Can an Automator Workflow/App Find Itself?

Xuff — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:06:13 -0800

Obscure Mac geekery filter... On OS X Leopard, how can I get a reference to the current location of an Automator workflow/app in a shell script within that workflow? I've got a complex Automator workflow that currently has to move files in and out of various directories. Currently these directories live in a specific location that's hard coded into the workflow. What I'd like to do is have the workflow be able to reference it's own package and create the directories it needs inside itself (ex. /some/random/path/myworkflow.workflow/Contents/niftyFolders) or, barring that, just create the directories in the same directory the workflow itself is currently in. Unfortunately I can't find a way to get the location of the workflow itself.

I'm thinking the most likely way to do it at this point is with AppleScript, and I've looked into that a little, but have come up empty. AppleScript and I have never clicked, so I thought I'd turn to all of you.

Thanks!

My Macbook pro won't start

Ringo — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:01:54 -0800

Mac emergency! I was forced to shut my mac down in the middle of upgrading to Leopard and now it won't start up again! I stupidly started an installation when I was with friends at a cafe. It closed so we had to leave and it was pouring rain but it was saying it would still be over an hour until it was done. I closed the lid and now it won't start. The power goes on but it just has the apple sign and the "thinking" thing. It spit out the Leopard disk. I tried the original Mac OS X startup disk I had and that won't work either.

Low-end laptop

mccarty.tim — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:48:08 -0800

What's a good netbook or netbook-like computer for my mom and sister? 4 years ago, I built an Athlon XP 2500+ computer for my family. Back then, it was a $550 gaming machine (All in Wonder 9400+, which died a few months ago and was replaced by a $30 cheapie card), but after 4 years of use, it's beginning to be slow and cumbersome. I don't have the time to do a full system reinstall, and I'm not sure it's what the system needs. It's loud, slow to boot, slow to run, and takes up a lot of space, and the hardware is starting to show some quirks which flashes won't fix (BIOS does not always boot, needs a hard reset by flipping the back switch, network card drops connections, computer turns itself on when shut off). Being at home with my laptop makes me realize how much my mom and sister hate it, because they're always asking me to look stuff up on my MacBook Pro.

Lately, netbooks have entered the market and look like a good option, because about 90% of what they do is web browsing and basic text editing. The other 10% can be satisfied by the old Windows machine. However, for what they are, they seem expensive compared to the older Apple laptops on sale on Ebay. They don't really need a sub-10 inch laptop. What they really need is just something less cumbersome than the old desktop I built.

I think an old Apple laptop may be better for them, since I'm familiar with OSX and I think they would have an easier time with it than Windows or a Linux derivative.

Our house has an 802.11G network running from a hacked WRT54G router, which reaches pretty much every room. I'd be okay with the computer running 802.11B, but if the difference were $20 between G and B, I'd go for it. As for the laptop, I'd like one that is fairly user-serviceable (IE, RAM and hard drive are easy to replace/upgrade, CD drive replaceable would be nice, but not crucial), since these would be fairly old machines. I know that Boot Camp and Parallels are impossible on that setup, but they don't need that, so it's moot. If the machine could run Leopard decently, that would be useful, but just Tiger is acceptable. Also, are replacement batteries hard to find for old machines?

Is there any model that satisfies or comes close to what I said, or would I be better off getting them a netbook or certain model of old PC laptop? My budget would probably be from $200-300, so it would have to expand for a netbook. I'd expect the machine to be sturdy, but not very. I wouldn't expect them to take it out of the house much. Would they really benefit from the added speed/build quality of a Powerbook over an iBook for what I described?

OSX: Future as a programmer dashed by failure to interpret Terminal error

metajc — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:49:53 -0800

Multiple sources credit this Hivelogic post as the definitive guide to getting MySQL up and running on a Mac OS X. But I can't get past the first few steps. I am not a programmer. But I wish I was; they earn more than me and have the best office in the building. I know HTML and CSS and basic PHP. I have been trying out a bunch of Ruby, Python, Django, and PHP tutorials lately but they're all kind of useless because they're not directly applicable to a hosted, "live site" environment that I'm used to ... So, I'm trying to install MySQL on my Intel Macs running 10.5.4 (powerbook and imac) to have a local testing environment but BANG I'm an idiot and I cannot get through this apparently simple tutorial. Of course, the comments are closed and my Googling yields no answer. I was about to give up when I remembered my good friends over here.

Here's what happens, I try to download and build MySQL as instructed:

curl -O http://mysql.he.net/Downloads/MySQL-5.0/mysql-5.0.45.tar.gz
tar xzvf mysql-5.0.45.tar.gz

But I get the following error:

gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

I've tried downloading newer versions of MySQL but I just don't know what I'm doing.

Man Attempting to Move Leopard

indiewizard — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 07:41:38 -0800

Great MeFites, I come bearing but a humble request. I bought a MacBook Pro about six months before Leopard was released. When it finally came out, I installed it on a partition on an external drive, which I would boot from (because OS X is awesome like that, amirite?) so I could test out all my apps. Now I'm ready to commit to Leopard full-time - what's the best way to go about transplanting my Leopard partition? In my head, I would copy everything precious to the external drive, and then go into Disk Utility and select "Restore" (I'm not in front of my Mac right now, so I don't know the exact option, but it's a tab that comes up in the main pane when you select the root drive in the left-hand pane), where I would select Leopard as the source, and my internal drive as the destination. However, the internal drive is just slightly bigger than the Leopard partition - would this present a problem?

Also, what are my other options? Specifially, Carbon Copy Cloner comes to mind - is this what I need?

Also also, I would like to merge my Adium chat logs - any programs available? If this isn't possible, I'll settle for simply copying them to my Documents folder, and using Spotlight.

A thousand thank-yous in advance.

Please get this ball out of my court.

miniminimarket — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 13:55:54 -0800

I've tried several things to get rid of the spinning beach ball, willing to try, oh, several more. I have a Macbook 2.16 GHz, 2 GB of ram, etc., that I bought almost a year ago. Bad hard drive problems back in December, but things had been fine since I had it replaced. Then a month ago I started getting the spinning ball with intermittent freezes that last from 10-30 seconds. After the ball goes away there's a rush of activity (all the clicks and mouse moves I tried to do while the ball was spinning happen at once). They've been getting worse. I took it back to Tekserv, who said they couldn't find a thing wrong with the drive. They suggested I do a fresh OS install and suggested it was all the run-at-startup programs I had causing the slowdown.

So, now I've got Leopard installed (a fresh install), and I've moved over just my docs, music, and movies (no programs) from my external drive, but I'm still getting the spinning ball. Other things that I've tried:

--verified and repaired disk/disk permissions
--tried resetting PRAM, but it never dings more than once

What's my next move? Has anyone had a similar problem? Is there anything I can do to prove that there's a problem to Tekserv? I should also mention, I can sometimes goes hours, or a whole day, without a freeze, then other days it happens every 5-10 minutes.

Thanks for your help.

Why won't XCode let me select text?

designbot — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:50:11 -0800

What the deuce? Why can't I type in certain areas using XCode? I'm just getting started learning to program in Objective-C using XCode under Leopard, and I'm encountering a bizarre behavior. The I-beam cursor just doesn't work in some areas of my code.

Here's a sample:

//

//  main.m

//  prog1

//



#import 



int main(int argc, const char *argv[])

{

	int sum;

	

	// compute result

	sum = 25 + 37 - 19;

	

	// display results

	printf ("The answer is %i.\n", sum);

	

	return 0;

}

Clicking in most of the code works like you would expect; the I-beam starts blinking, and I can edit the text as I would like.

But if I click anywhere in the area indicated in italics, the I-beam just turns into an arrow cursor until I move the mouse, the blinking text cursor doesn't appear, and I can't edit the text. It is possible to position the cursor before or after the bold area and maneuver into it with the arrow keys.

What on earth is going on here?

Can't delete my mail.

blaneyphoto — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 12:04:57 -0800

Mail won't let me delete one particular email! I've got a brand new 24" iMac, running OSX 10.5 (Leopard) and everything is fine - except this one email that I can't get rid of! I've tried everything I can think of but it still hangs out when deleted. Specifically, when I delete it, rather than going to the trash it just dims as though its been marked as "read". It then appears as unread in my inbox the next time I launch Mail. Its a message from a yahoo group if that matters. All the other messages from that group have been received, read and deleted just fine.

Any ideas???