Mac Your PC

Some final words

Repair permissions

Repair permissions is often seen as a general tonic for a whole range of problems. It’s not. It is considered good form to repair permissions after any major application install or system update. Fire up Disk Utility select your MAC OS X partition and click repair permissions.

Have a strategy

You can save yourself a lot of trouble along the way if you come up with a strategy for managing your extensions. Devise a folder structure and keep everything organized.

One possibility is:

‘/Users/Me/Dell1525/Extensions/New’ – this is were you “land” new extensions.

‘/users/Me/Dell1525/Extensions/Current’ as the base for a copy of your current setup. Inside this folder you create folders for Backup, Installed extra, Installed system. Versioning your backups if there is more than one of something isn’t a bad idea. You get the point, a little time now can save major headaches later. Burn these things to a disc every now and again so that you can do a fresh install without having to hunt down all you extensions.

Rescue disc

If your system panics when booting or you lose your keyboard and mouse, you need a way to get in and fix things.

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Lets get some work done

Before we get to the particulars, a few things.  The commands you are about to see require you to execute them with “Super User” privileges.  On unix and unix derived systems like Mac OS X the super user is known as the root user.  As root you can do what you want disregarding permissions.  You need to be careful.  The difference between these two commands may appear subtle (it’s only a space), but one will remove a single folder, the other will try to remove every file on your system.

‘sudo rm -rf /Users/Me/Myfiles/’ is OK and will remove only the folder ‘Myfiles’ in the home directory of the user ‘Me’.

‘sudo rm -rf /Users/Me/Myfiles /’ is NOT OK.  It will remove the folder ‘Myfiles’ and then start removing files, recursively, from the ‘/’ (root) directory.  This is not a good thing!

If you want to get more information about any of these commands, or any shell command, you can use ‘man’ (short for manual).

‘man ls’ will tell you everything and more you ever wanted to know about the ‘ls’ command (short for list).

This guide and others may contain typos.  For that reason you should hesitate to copy and paste commands into the terminal.  Take the time to type the command, think about what your trying to do, and if your not sure of the exact syntax have a look at the man page first.  Always have a second look BEFORE pressing enter.

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