Physics Hacker

If you ever wondered how to do a Time Machine backup to some NFS, AFS or SMB volume, here is the solution:

In the terminal (Terminal.app) enable Time Machine to use unsupported volumes:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences  TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Now you can use any mounted device! This is especially nice if you are working in a company or in a research group where you often already have some remote storage available.

I recently installed Scientific Linux in a virtual Machine on my MacBook and ended up with the Standard PC keyboard layout. As the keyboard layout of my MacBook has quite some differences, I tried to figure out how to get all the keys I’m used to.

Here’s what I did (following the advices given here):

• open the file /etc/sysconfig/keyboard and change it (for a german keyboard) as following
  

  KEYBOARDTYPE="mac"
  KEYTABLE="mac-de-latin1-nodeadkeys"

• for other layouts than the german one have a look at /lib/kbd/keymaps/mac/all/ and choose one of the keytables listed there
  

We have an old Océ printer for our office. Unfortunately the official drivers I could find on the website of the producer do not work for Mac OS X 10.5. Luckily I found working drivers at the Hochschule Luzern.

I recently wanted to start Mac OS X Applications from the console. Sometimes it is possible to start an application directly if it’s possible to find the executable in the application folder. But sometimes, espaccially for application installers there is no executable. In this case it is possible to start the application (or installer) by using the open command. e.g. to start TextEdit:

open /Applications/TextEdit.app

The open command does the same as clicking on a file / application. So you could open a pdf document like this:

open document.pdf

Sometimes an installer requires to run as a superuser. Starting the installer with

sudo open /Applications/INSTALLER_APP

unfortunately does not work, because only open will run as a superuser, but not the installer itself. To start the installer as superuser the following might help:

• pkg installer:

sudo ./MyApplication.app/Contents/MacOS/Installer

• other installers (no linebreak!)

sudo /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Support/LaunchCFMApp \
  ./MyApplication.app/Contents/MacOS/application