Technomancy

I’ve used OSX and Ubuntu as a desktop and there are a couple of little things that each does that I’m well impressed with.

Wireless on OSX on a laptop is brilliant. On Ubuntu/Gnome it’s shite.

On OSX when you plug in an external mouse, your trackpad is disabled. Stops your cursor from moving around randomly when typing.

On Ubuntu/Gnome/Nautilus, pressing rename or F2 will select all the filename except the file extension, so you can rename “dcm0001.jpg” to “my car.jpg” by pressing the minimum amount of keys. You rarely need to change the file extension. On OSX the keyboard shortcut for renaming a file is Enter. Yes Enter, you use Command-O to open a file.

I went to the apple.ie online shop. I bought an ibook and selected UK keyboard layout (as opposed to french) and when it arrived I selected Irish keyboard layout on the preferences. Yet it’s still an american keyboard layout. Braindead.

Since OSX doesn’t believe in the control button, they have invented the command button. It’s that weird clover leaf thing. In the Apple HIG the command key is to be used instead of the control key. However Just about all other OSs use the control key heavily. The Mac OSX control key on an iBook is tiny and in a weird place, and there’s only one of them.

To map the command keys to send control in X place the following lines in your /etc/X11/Xmodmap:
keycode 115 = Control_L
add Control = Control_L

Source

When I got my iBook, I used Mac OSX for a while. There were some things that annoyed me, and I managed to fix most of them. I wrote my tips and tricks up here, however to keep with the theme, here they all are.

Setting the default Aspell dictionary to British English

Put this: “lang en_GB” in ~/.aspell.conf

Getting MPlayer to play rmvb files

Install the closed source RealPlayer codecs from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/rp9codecs-macosx-20041107.pkg.zip. Open a terminal and execute: “sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/codecs /usr/local/lib/mplayer”. You will have to put in your password. This is necessary because the RealPlayer codec installer, installs it in the incorrect place. A bug has been filed. You can open this in MPlayer. The default application to open .rmvb files is with Microsoft Excel, scroll down to the end of this page to find out how to change this. I don’t think these codec are very efficent. If the video is choppy and sluggish, try running mplayer from the command line with the “-framedrop” argument, ie “mplayer -framedrop film.rmvb”

Case insensitive completion in bash

The OSX filesystem is case insensitive (unlike most unices). However the bash shell’s filename completion is case sensitive. Put this in your ~/.inputrc and restart terminal: “set completion-ignore-case on”.
Source

Close Terminal Window on logout

When you logout of a terminal with Control-D, by default the window will not close, one must manually close it with Command-W. To make the window close automatically on logout, open Window Settings under the Terminal menu bar. Select ‘Close only if the shell exited cleanly’ under ‘When the shell exists:’. Press the ‘Use Settings as default’. Source

A (semi-)proper UK keyboard layout

Apple’s idea of a UK (and hence Irish) keyboard layout is wrong. @ and ” are swapped place ~ and ` are swapped. Download this uk keyboard mapping, unstuff it (Tiger users need to download StuffIt). and put it in /Library/Keyboard Layouts/ (you might need to do this in a terminal and sudo it). Then restart your mac (I know, I know). Change the keyboard layout to British - Windows in System Preferences -> International -> Input Menu. I found that this broke the forward delete hack for terminal. You may need to do that hack again. This is not a proper UK keyboard layout, though. \ is still in the wrong place. I’m still not sure about that. Source

Disabling back/forward two finger scrolling in Firefox

On recent iBooks, by moving two fingers on the trackpad, one can scroll up, down left and right in a window. In firefox ’scrolling right’ moves forward, left moves back in the history. To disable the forward/back (but keep the up/down), go to about:config, set mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 1, set mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines to false, play around with the mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines and mousewheel.withnokey.numlines values until you’re satisfied with the scrolling speed, I have mine set to 3. Source

Installing and using Java 1.5

OSX 10.4.2 comes with Java 1.4.2 by default. Download and install Java 1.5 from Apple here. This includes java prferences under /Applications/Utilities/Java/J2SE 5.0, which can be used to change the default java cirtual machine, not the default compiler. To change the default compiler, open a terminal and become root with ’sudo su root’. Enter your password. Then ‘cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/’, ‘rm CurrentJDK’, ‘ln -s 1.5.0 CurrentJDK’, ‘exit’. Your java compiler will now be version 1.5.0. To allow eclipse to use the 1.5 java compiler, enter preferences with Cmd-, then select java -> compiler, select 5.0 as the compiler compliance level. At the bottom of the window text warning you that you need java 5 install. Click on Configure there, you’ll get a window about install jres. Click Add. Type is Mac OSX VM. JRE name can be anything, I recommend ‘Java 1.5′, JRE home directory must be ‘/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home’ Then click ok. Click the checkbox beside the new java 1.5 and deselect the JVM 1.4.2 (MacOSX X Defaut). Source

Changing the hostname

Edit the file /etc/hostconfig. Change the line HOSTNAME=$HOSTNAME. Note: You must put the new hostname in /etc/hosts eg “127.0.0.1 $HOSTNAME” or jdb (the java debugger) will not work. Source

Favicons in bookmark toolbar in defualt Firefox Theme

Add the following to chrome/userChrome.css:
.bookmark-item > .toolbarbutton-icon {
display: block !important;
} Source

Making the forward delete key (’delete’) work in Terminal

Open Terminal’s Terminal menu, pick Window Settings, and then choose “Keyboard” in the pop-up menu. Double-click on the ‘del (forward delete)’ key, and in the sheet that pops open, activate the input box just below “Action.” Type Control-Option-D, and you should see ‘\004′ in the box. Click OK, close the Terminal Inpsector window. Source