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Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition
book

Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

by David Pogue
July 2005
Intermediate to advanced
866 pages
29h 18m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

Minor Eccentric Behavior

All kinds of glitches may befall you, occasionally, in Mac OS X. 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 in 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 Chapter 12.

When something just doesn't seem to be working right, therefore, open your ApplicationsUtilities folder and open Disk Utility. Proceed as shown in Figure B-1.

This is a really, really great trick to know.

Tip

Many 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 10.4, 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 in the age of Mac OS X, and we're still throwing ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596009410Errata Page