Panther Swaps

Ahh, another thing that I meant to share..

Panther broke our old method of moving swapfiles. I remember when I installed Panther first, slapping the rc code into place and rebooting, not thinking for a second that it wouldn't work. Damn! Took me a good hour to figure this out, so, to save you an hour or so, here goes..

After a few trial and errors, I decided to use an old-fashioned method of doing this. Any dirty hack must be judged firstly on whether or not it works, and this does, superbly.

First have a UFS swap volume ready.

In this example it is called "Swap". If you call it something else *sigh* then please change *all* instances of the word "Swap".

open the file /etc/rc

replace..

original:

update

echo "Starting virtual memory"

swapdir=/private/var/vm
if [ "${netboot}" = "1" ]; then
sh /etc/rc.netboot setup_vm ${swapdir}
fi

# Make sure the swapfile exists

with..

updated:

update

umount -v /Volumes/Swap*
if [ -d /Volumes/Swap ]; then
ConsoleMessage "*** DELETING old Swap directory(s) ***"
rm -rf /Volumes/Swap*
fi

echo "Starting virtual memory"


if [ "${netboot}" = "1" ]; then
sh /etc/rc.netboot setup_vm ${swapdir}
fi

swapdir=/Volumes/Swap/swaps

# let's do it the old-fashioned way
if [ ! -d ${swapdir} ]; then
mkdir -p -m 755 /Volumes/Swap
# do 'df' in the terminal to get the *exact* string for the disk
mount -t ufs /dev/disk0s10 /Volumes/Swap
mount -uw /
fi

# Make sure the swapfile exists

Please read the notes in the code before performing the edit. You must ascertain the exact drive letter of your swap volume. Mine is "/dev/disk0s10", but yours may be something else.

When you reboot, check that swap files are forming in their correct location. Then you can safely delete the old ones.

that's it. Clean and frag-free swaps are yours once again!

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

more updates

ahh, but I didn't stop there.

it's kind of a standard coffee-break activity for me, messing about with my various packages and distributions. A couple of recent "panther updates"..

pseudo

This still works fine in Panther, but the gui is a wee bit messed up. My fault entirely. Anyways, I've updated it to be sweet and cool on Panther, and you can grab the latest version on the pseudo page . I've updated the pic on that page too, so you can see how neat it looks before you download it. The main soft index (and pseudo tricks page) still has the old image, so you can compare.

camino tab controller

This was always just a silly hack, more a wee beginner's lesson in Interface Builder than anything else, but amazingly some folks do use it, I know, I had emails along the lines of "it's broke". So it's fixed. I mean sheesh! How hard would it have been to do it yourself eh? heheh

it's here, without an updated pic this time, cuz it looks pretty much identical to the old one.

darkstat

I'll get round to this pretty soon. The old version still works fine, but the new xcode tools turn out a smaller, faster binary that you really do want. GREAT NEWS! Darkstat now compiles in OS X without any messing about, so long as you have the dev tools. If you really can't wait for me to get the new package together (There's a fair bit of text and stuff needs updating too) then simply compile yer own! and drop it into /usr/local/bin, replacing the old one.

don't forget the colours! (www.c)

that'll do,
for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

update

This isn't a blog entry, as such. Not that any of them are really. This is just to let you know about a few new things which have appeared on the site.

Firstly I've put together an OS X distribution of the man2html program. Check it out here. Briefly, it allows you to view those wonderful MAN pages in your favourite web browser, instead of the cramped terminal which, while excellent for doing commands and stuff, is completely useless as a document viewer, especially for big stuff like some of these man pages are!

It comes in two flavours, automatic and manual install. The latter is for folks that have mucked about with their apache install in some way, but I recommend these folks download the automatic installer too.

Next, I've finally put out my "wee script pack" which I've been telling folks about for a good month now but hadn't actually put it anywhere for them to grab. You can get it here.

Essentially it's a small collection of useful scripts, the kind of thing that any half-savvy OS X power-user could put together themselves, if they were bothered. I am.

The installer will set everything up for you so you can, for instance, simply type ra in the terminal and have apache restart. Ahhh.. I guess the highlight is my wonderful "feck-a-package" uninstaller which I renamed to "uninstaller" for the masses. This baby's sole purpose is to uninstall Packages, something the Apple installer still doesn't do. *sigh*.

There's a few other useful things in there. it's 36k. You want it!

Note, I've started using the OS X built-in zipping mechanism for my distributions now, so if you use some other unzipper (like, eek, stuffit) you run the risk of having an extra "__MAC OSX" folder created with all the resource forks in it. During this period of transition I have stripped all resource forks from the packages, so any old unzipper will work, but be warned, in future this might not be possible.

USE THE BUILT-IN ZIP/UNZIP MECHANISM! (it's right there on a right-click!)

that's about it, I think. Got too much on just now to get my head round a "real" blog. One of my current projects involves outputting thousands and thousands (and thousands!) of words of text a day, and after that I don't feel much like blogging.

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org