OS X

How To: Deploy MS Office to Mac

Posted by Rick on in Microsoft, Technology How To's 0 Comment

How To: Deploy MS Office to Mac

One of the biggest pains in deploying MS Office to OS X in a business or education environment is making sure that the serial number deploys too.

To do this, you need to also deploy the following files:

~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.autoupdate2.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.error_reporting.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.setupassistant.plist

Deploying these files will keep also keep the initial setup assistant from running upon first launch.

Deployment can be via any of your normal methods, Apple Remote Desktop being the “Apple Preferred Way,” of course.

How To: Disable OS X Quick Look

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How To: Disable OS X Quick Look

Quick Look in OS X is an awesome feature. I’m constantly using it to check out PDF files without needing to open them.

But in some environments, it doesn’t make sense or causes a huge amount of issues.

So to disable this, in the terminal type; (as root or admin user)

defaults write “$3/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.quicklook” Disabled -bool true

Restart the Finder, and you’re good to go!

This works in 10.6.x but apparently crashes 10.5.x (I’m not able to confirm the later as I don’t have 10.5)

Updating /etc/hosts on OS X

Posted by Rick on in Apple, Command Line, OSX, Technology How To's, Unix 0 Comment

Updating /etc/hosts on OS X

Sometimes you need to have a static IP address configured to a specific domain name on OS X. For instance, locally testing a web server is a great reason to do this. Doing so is fairly easy to setup, but does take a bit of command line work.

First, edit /etc/hosts with your favorite text editor.

the default looks something like this:

##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost

Edit the file, add in the IP address under the 255.255.255.255 address, then put in the hostname with spaces over under “localhost.”

Then you have to reload the hosts file.

OS X 10.4 type:

sudo niload -v -m hosts . < /etc/hosts

on OS X 10.5 and 10.6
lookupd -flushcache
dscacheutil -flushcache

Then simply ping the new domain name and check that is resolves to the correct IP address. (assuming the other computer is setup to respond correctly)

How To: Redirect Linux display to OS X

Posted by Rick on in Command Line, Linux, OSX, Technology How To's 0 Comment

How To: Redirect Linux display to OS X

Install Macports

Open X11 type: xhost + (allows incoming connections from ‘anywhere’)

for extra security add machine name or username ssh to linux machine and type: setenv DISPLAY “ip address”:0 or setenv DISPLAY “full hostname”:0 (Note setenv is a CSH command, you may need to switch shells)

replace ip address with the ip address of the machine you arer connecting from.

Launch program (such as Gimp) and start using it.

Thunderbird RSS Feed Fix

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Thunderbird RSS Feed Fix

I love Thunderbird for reading emails, and keeping track of my RSS feeds.

But for some reason RSS tends to become corrupted. I don’t believe it’s necessarily Thunderbird’s fault, although it seems a bit pickier about feeds that are correctly crafted then other RSS readers.

A clue that there is a problem is RSS feeds simply stop receiving any new messages. When looking at the feed it appears that it is no longer subscribed. Deleting the feed and resubscribing fails with a message stating that the feed is already subscribed.

In cases like this the only fix seems to be to manually delete the feed.

In Windows do this by going to: C:Documents and SettingsUserNameApplication DataThunderbirdProfileswsfdfsgb.defaultMailFeeds

The part after profiles, in this case wsgjbxgb.default, will be different on each machine. In some cases there might even be two files that both have .default in them. If so, the newest one is usually correct.

On Macintosh, these files are located in /Users/username/Library/Thunderbird/profiles/wsfdfsgb.default/Mail/News & Blogs/

Once in the correct folder, simply delete all files with the name of the site that you’re pulling feeds from. Note that this will also delete any saved articles you might have kept, so be sure to back those up within Thunderbird.

After deleting the files, restart Thunderbird and re-add the feeds. Everything should be working now!