Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 1 adds support for Java SE 6
Update: Apple’s java6 port can’t run IDEA… Back to java5. :-\
Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 1 adds support for Java SE 6
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Monthly Archives: April 2008
Ant bash completion on Mac OS X
bash will do tab-completion for ant targets on Debian/Ubuntu boxes out-of-the-box. If you haven’t upgraded lately, you may need to:
sudo apt-get install bash-completion
On Mac OS X, it needs a bit of massaging. First install the macports version of bash-completion and ant:
sudo port install bash-completion apache-ant
Then add this to the end of your ~/.bashrc:
if [ -f /opt/local/etc/bash_completion ]; then . /opt/local/etc/bash_completion fi complete -C /opt/local/share/java/apache-ant/bin/complete-ant-cmd.pl ant
See http://marius.scurtescu.com/2005/03/23/ant_bash_completion for Windows instructions.
Secure VNC with ssh port forwarding
Need to help out a damsel in distress (username “damsel”) sitting on a remote debian/ubuntu box (“remotehost”)? Have you set up ssh on a non-standard port (port 12345) already? Great. Keep reading.
Step 1: Install x11vnc on the remote machine:
ssh remotehost sudo apt-get install x11vnc
Step 2: Spin up x11vnc on the remote host:
ssh remotehost sudo -u damsel x11vnc -noxdamage -speeds dsl -solid -display :0 -passwd SECRET
Keep this ssh running. -speeds dsl -solid makes vnc more responsive.
Step 3: Forward the remotehost’s vnc port, 5900, to your local host using ssh:
ssh -p 12345 -L 5900:127.0.0.1:5900 remotehost
Step 4: Start up your VNC viewer application, pointing to localhost.
Tightvnc is a great vncviewer and is installable through macports:
sudo port install tightvnc
Then run:
vncviewer localhost
Dealing with a directory with ~∞ files
Got a directory with > 10K of files? Need to move them up one directory? mv will fail you:
$ mv * .. -bash: /bin/mv: Argument list too long
The solution is to list the files one line at a time (with find or ls -1) and feed that to xargs:
ls -1 | head -100 | xargs -I f mv f ..
This moves the first 100 files up one directory.
Note that this won’t work if you’ve got whitespace in your filenames. Use find -0 and xargs -0 to null-separate your filenames in that case.
Verifying file integrity with debsums
After upgrading my Ubuntu server, some security applications grumped about changed contents of some common binaries.
Just to be safe, I wanted to verify them explicitly with debsums, but debsums looks for package names, not paths to binaries. Here’s a script that validates chattr, find, perl, and lsattr–the “-s” option to debsums is “silent”, so no news is good news:
for i in /usr/bin/chattr /usr/bin/find /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/lsattr ; do echo $i debsums -as $(dpkg -S $i | cut -d':' -f1 | sort -u) done
Running a command for all files whose name matches…
I found a stray image named “img_1234.jpg” on a laptop and wanted to see if I already had it on my server.
On my Mac I could use spotlight’s nifty “kind:image” filter along with quicklook. Macworld has a great article about advanced spotlight usage.
On Ubuntu, it’s almost as easy:
locate -i img_1234.jpg | xargs -d'\n' feh -F -d
- The
locate -isays “find img_1234.jpg without case sensitivity. Locate likes to separate filenames (that might have spaces) with a newline. - The
xargs -d'\n'says “expect filenames that are are separated by newline - The
feh -F -dtells feh, a great little image viewer, to reduce the image to fit to the screen and draw the filename.
Installing VMware Player on Ubuntu Gutsy
Please note that these instructions are for Ubuntu 7.10. Newer versions of Ubuntu can just follow the normal installation instructions at http://www.vmware.com/download/player/.
So it turns out that the current release of Ubuntu (at least for another four days), “Gutsy Gibbon”, gave VMware Player the big cold shoulder and removed it as an installable package.
To top it off, the email-capture marketing application that VMware uses is broken, so you can’t download vmware-player through their website now. (How is this acceptable? Shame on both companies–eloqua for downtime with something as simple as a form capture, and vmware for not canceling their service).
Some sleuthing came up with the direct URL to the download for VMware Player 2.0.3.
While that downloads, go install the required packages:
sudo apt-get install \ build-essential linux-headers-generic \ linux-headers-$(uname -r)
Uncompress the archive:
sudo mkdir -p /opt/vmware-player sudo chown $(whoami) /opt/vmware-player cd /opt/vmware-player tar xvzf ~/Desktop/VMware-player-2.0.3-80004.i386.tar.gz
Then start the install. I’d recommend not putting the binaries into /usr/bin (as this will be a non-.deb installation, and it will make the uninstalling easier):
sudo ./vmware-install.pl ... In which directory do you want to install the binary files? [/usr/bin] /opt/vmware-player/bin ...
From here on out, take the default values.
+1 for Apple
Night before last, I found bad blocks on my MacBook Pro. I dropped off the laptop at the Burlingame Apple Store (after making an “Apple Concierge” appointment, so no lines), and the Apple employee that took my laptop said that it would be ready in “3 to 5 days, but we’ll try our best”. That afternoon the laptop hard drive had been replaced and was ready for pickup.
When I turned on the mac, the clean install of Leopard asked me if I had a Time Machine backup to restore from, I plugged in the external drive, and 4 hours later (!!) the computer was back.
Bad Blocks Make Macs Unhappy
My fairly young MacBook Pro started randomly hanging, not coming out of sleep, and being generally disagreeable a couple days ago, and it turned out to be a bad hard disk.
What’s disconcerting is that Disk Utility.app didn’t see any problem with the disk. I had to install smartmontools to find the error.
After installing MacPorts, install smartmontools:
sudo port install smartmontools
Then tell the drive to do a long self-check in the background:
sudo smartctl -t long /dev/disk0
Note that this check may take an hour to run, but it’s done in the background, so you can continue to use your computer while it does its little dance on the catwalk.
Check the status of the test with:
sudo smartctl -c /dev/disk0
I was unlucky:
... Self-test execution status: ( 121) The previous self-test completed having the read element of the test failed. ...
See The macosxhints forums for more discussion about this issue.
Maildir auto-archive
If you’ve got your mail sitting on some server and in Maildir format, and you’ve used Outlook’s “Auto Archive” feature, you might wish that your inbox (and subdirectory contents) could be automatically swept clean of items older than, say, 3 weeks, and shoved into a Year/Quarter sub folder (like “Inbox/2008/Q1/”).
A couple years ago I wanted this too. So I wrote a cronjob and perl script to make this happen.
Installation is straightforward:
- Copy the shell script that cron calls, autoarchive, and the perl script, autoarchive.pl, onto the server holding your Maildir.
- Edit the autoarchive shellscript to make sure the path and –max-days is ok with you.
- Make both scripts executable with
chmod u+x - Make a backup of your mail. This is GPL code. No warranty is implied. Read the code and try it out with –dry-run first.
- Calling autoarchive.pl with the “–dry-run” option will let you make sure it’s doing what you want it to do. If it does, delete the dry-run.
- Wire it up to cron with something like:
PATH=$HOME/bin:/usr/bin:/bin 42 10 * * * autoarchive > /dev/null