December 2003
Beginner to intermediate
776 pages
45h 2m
English
Content preview from Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Minor Eccentric Behavior
Mac OS X itself is generally about as unstable as Mount Everest. It’s the programs that most often cause you grief.
All kinds of glitches may befall you. Your desktop picture doesn’t change when you change it in System Preferences. A menulet doesn’t open when you click it. A program won’t open—it just bounces on the Dock a couple of times and then stops.
When a single program is acting up like this, but quitting and restarting it does no good, try the following steps, in the following sequence.
First Resort: Repair Permissions
An amazing number of mysterious glitches arise because the permissions of either that item or something in your System folder have become muddled—that is, the complex mesh of interconnected Unix permissions described in Section 16.1.1.
When something just doesn’t seem to be working right, therefore, open your Applications→ Utilities folder and open Disk Utility. Proceed as shown in Figure B-1.
Tip
Most Mac mavens, in fact, believe in running this Repair Permissions routine after running any kind of installer, just to nip nascent problems in the bud. That includes both installers of new programs and of Apple’s own Mac OS X updates.
Second Resort: Look for an Update
If a program starts acting up immediately after you’ve installed or upgraded to Mac OS X 10.3, chances are good that it has some minor incompatibility. Chances are also good that you’ll find an updated version on the company’s Web site.
Third Resort: Toss the Prefs File
Here we are ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.