Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with osx and leopard

Sharing Is Caring?

murtagh — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:54:25 -0800

Sharing a printer between an iMac (with printer driver installed) and a Windows laptop without installing any drivers on the laptop: can it be done? I have an iMac running OS X Leopard. My sister is using her work laptop. Unfortunately, her company has disallowed (blocked) installation of any new software on the laptop, which includes printer drivers. We need to share the printer between the iMac and the laptop. The iMac, to which the printer is connected, has the printer drivers installed.

Can the printer be shared between the iMac and the laptop without installing any drivers on the laptop?

The printer is a Canon Pixma MP145.

Please tell me this is possible (or any possible alternatives). Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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?

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?

Trouble with Logitech USB 350 headset under OSX 10.5.7

oxidizer — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:27:41 -0800

I've just upgraded a G5 tower from 10.2.x to 10.5.7. The upgrade went off without a hitch... but... i do have a problem using my Logitech USB 350 headset with the system now. When making a call with Skype, for example, the headset will typically work for a while (several minutes) before suddenly throwing out massive amounts of horrible noise via the mike channel. When this happens, I can hear the other side of the conversation just fine, they however can't hear anything except an aneurysm-inducing noise. If I hang-up and restart the connection, the game repeats. Sometime the noise sets in sooner, sometimes later - however, it always sets in. Facts: 1.) This headset worked without a hitch before the upgrade (from 10.2.x). 2.) Audio settings on a system level and within Skype are correct. Does anyone have any clue as to what is going on and what might remedy the situation?

control-clicky wiki

artdrectr — Fri, 01 May 2009 13:00:56 -0800

OSX (Tiger): Using Control-Click > Quick Search, I want to add Wikipedia to the list. How?

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.

Looking for a Countdown Timer That'll Go Higher Than 99 Hours

interrobang — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 14:55:41 -0800

I'm looking for an OSX application, widget, or menubar item that will display a countdown to a date. Ideally, I'd be able to set it for, say, May 14th, and it'll show me how many months, days, hours, and seconds are left until the date. It'd be even better if I could run more than one of these timers at a time. I need this to work on Tiger, but Leopard stuff could be useful, too. Thank you!

How do I turn off mouse snapping with 'Enable access for assistive devices' in Leopard off?

chrisWhite — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 15:04:40 -0800

I recently installed Text Expander and Slife and they both ask me to 'Enable access for assistive devices,' when I do so my mouse starts snapping to dialog boxes whenever a prompt comes up. This is driving me nuts! Any idea how I turn it off?
Here's what it's doing: http://screencast.com/t/RdmNv8Hf6

I checked with another Mac user who's been using Text Expander for years and he's never seen this when he turns the option on. I've been all through the options in Universal Access, Keyboard and Mouse, Trackpad and Steer Mouse and I can't figure out which option turns it off! Google isn't being too helpful either, at least with the search terms I've tried.

Along the way I managed to change something that's making my screensavor go on semi-randomly while I'm working. It's disabled in the preferences and it's not hot corners, usually seems to happen when I'm moving the mouse around. Any ideas what I changed?

Thanks!

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?

Help me avoid weekly tech support calls.

killjoy — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 21:18:55 -0800

I have two G4 PowerBooks that I've wiped, packed with RAM and installed Leopard on. Now how do I make them as parent-friendly as possible? So far I have:
- installed basic apps like FF, VLC, Word, Toast, Quicksilver
- disabled Spaces
- put regularly visited sites in the FF bookmark bar
- placed important apps and folders in the dock and enabled parental controls to lock it
- setup ichat for future troubleshooting adventures

Are there any other apps/fixes that might be helpful to my smart but not very tech-savvy parents? Any Firefox add-ons that might come in handy?

Turning folders into disk images on OS X

spyke23 — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:28:59 -0800

Automating turning folders into disk images in OS X Leopard. I'm starting to use Amazon S3 for backups, and rather than having a single big disk image for my photos, which would equate to 4.3GB, I would prefer to have single multiple folders to upload, and then be able to download/upload disk images as needed. I could then use then use the same process for my work related backups. Is there anyway to automate this process, or any utility which will take a folder and automatically turn it into a disk image of the same size?

Remote Management vs. Screensharing vs. VNC on OS X

caek — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 06:53:59 -0800

In OS X Leopard, what is the difference between enabling the Screen Sharing and Remote Management options in Sharing Preferences? Assuming I can figure out firewall/port issues, will enabling Remote Management on my work Mac enable me to establish a VNC connection using a generic VNC client like Chicken of the VNC or do I have to use Remote Desktop? What authorization is required? Can I set it up so it requires my usual Mac username and password rather than some other password? Do I have other options if I want people using Linux and Windows to remotely manage their Macs at work when they are not logged in at the terminal?

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.

Windows XP-Boot Camp-File Checking nonsense

mdonley — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 17:54:38 -0800

We are having a problem with hours-long file checks when booting into Windows XP (Home Edition, with SP2) via Boot Camp on an iMac running Leopard. Here's what happens when we restart the computer and seek to go into Windows:

- Restart
- Hold down Option key
- Choose Windows XP image
- Windows XP "loading" screen appears (with progress bar moving)
- Blue DOS-ish screen asking if we want to perform a file check to weed out corrupted files (I don't have the exact text), with the prompt to skip it by pressing any key
- Sometimes pressing the key works and XP finishes loading and the desktop appears...
- But sometimes it doesn't and we wait anywhere from 6 to 12 hours for the thing to finally get to the desktop!
- During the interminable wait, a tally of files and a percentage-complete figure are displayed on the screen, still in blue DOS-ish mode.

Some other details which might be helpful:

- This problem didn't occur for the first few weeks we had the computer (which we obtained last year);
- We have wiped the partition and reinstalled XP once, which didn't seem to help;
- The Windows side of things is used to play a MMORPG, Final Fantasy XI, the vast majority of the time, and might have some sort of third-party software installed, while the Mac side is more productivity-oriented;
- We have all the original installation stuff for both OS X and XP but would prefer to not lose all our data;
- The word "FAT32" seems to figure prominently in the blue-screened file checks and I'm not sure why after reading the Wikipedia page on FAT, unless this is some sort of defragmenting thing (though that may be a red herring).

Finally, this computer is mostly manned by a teenager (*points accusingly at non-MeFite brother*) who's heavy on the gaming and light on the technical details of how it all works; rare excursions into the brother's lair have been my only encounters with the problem. We use the computer for games, internet surfing, and light office stuff, so we haven't really tinkered under the hood; any step-by-step/simple explanations or advice you can offer would be fabulous.

If you can help us solve this we will, no joke, send you (edible) cookies.

Thanks!

Create local finder links for mail.app

Raff — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:35:07 -0800

A few of us work off a local OS X Fileserver. We often need to point each other to files deep with it by email. I am looking for an automated way to create clickable local links in the mail.app friendly format of "file:///Volumes/Server%20Portal/". Any solutions? I have found applescripts that nearly do it. But they only make POSIX links. For Mail to recognise and launch links they need both file:/// appended and spaces replaced with %20. I am guessing it could be achieved by a few additions to current applescripts, but unfortunately it is above me.

How do I program for OS X?

DMan — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 10:20:01 -0800

My new Intel iMac is coming in the mail in a day or two, and I'd really like to learn how to program software for OS X and for my iPod Touch. Where can I learn how to do this? So, as the question says, I'm getting a new Mac and I'm really interested in learning to write programs for it. I also got an iPod Touch free with the Mac, and I want to learn how to use the SDK to write programs for it. What resource can I use to learn this? Obviously, a free internet source would be great, but I'll buy a book if it's really good and will help.

I know C++, C#, and by extension a fair amount of C. Definitely willing to learn a new language to do this; I'm just not sure where to start.

So, AskMeFi, what's the definitive source for programming OS X?

Whats a good streaming source for Leopard?

DJWeezy — Wed, 21 May 2008 23:23:16 -0800

What is a good icecast source client for leopard? So I have recently begun trivia contests on some irc channels where i will host whoever wants to play some music and people will guess the song. I host these on my vps that runs icecast/shoutcast right now. Unfortunately i have yet to find a good program that will take the sound from my sound card on my mac and send it to my server for other people to listen too. When i was on windows i used oddcast. Anyone know of a good program for this? Also it need to not tell everyone what song is playing.

bonus: i was having trouble googling this, if you find one that way let me know you search terms.

Magical unticking ticky boxes in Leopard

badmoonrising — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:24:40 -0800

I'm running OS X Leopard on my beloved shiny Macbook and there's one thing that I find irritating. I love using F9, F10, F11 etc to bring up Exposé, Dashboard and the Desktop, but every now and again they suddenly stop functioning. It's normally when the computer's been on for a few days - I hit the keys and nothing happens. So I check in Keyboard Shortcuts of the System Prefs, and all the boxes in the "Dock, Exposé and Dashboard" are magically unticked. I can tick them again, and everything's fine and dandy for a few days. Alternatively, I can reboot and it's back to how it should be. (For a while...) Why is this happening, and how can I stop it? I'm running 10.5.2, although I have a vague feeling it used to do this in Tiger as well. I've tried googling to no avail. So I'll be left with egg on my face if it's something really obvious, but barring nefarious computer-use whilst sleepwalking, or me regularly hitting a certain evil combination of keys without noticing, I can't work out why this is happening.

Please, O Marvellous Hive Mind. Enlighten me!

how to restore preview pane in Leopard mail.app?

dcjd — Wed, 07 May 2008 00:50:26 -0800

How do I restore the preview pane on mail.app? I somehow got rid of the preview pane on Leopards mail.app, and after looking through the options and help, I haven't been able to find a way to turn it back on. Please help!

Trying to keep the Users folder from getting cluttered.

soplerfo — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:41:28 -0800

How can I keep the Users folder tidy in Leopard? I work at a university where we're moving towards having users login with their Active Directory accounts on Leopard workstations for the first time. We're hoping to keep the Users directory on these workstations clean. We've setup a nice default profile that works wonderfully, now we just want to be able to delete the user's folder after they logout. (we can't do a nightly cron job, folks have 24 hr access to these machines)

We were looking at Bombich's LoginWindow manager, but it doesn't seem to work in Leopard. From what I can tell, Bombich has ceased development on it.

I have a tidy little perl script that will delete all but the admin user's home folders. I figure I just need some way of triggering it with the appropriate permissions

I'm not great with Apple stuff, so I may just be approaching this in the completely wrong way - I'm certainly open to any and all suggestions.