Techline 4 Teens

If you’ve ever used linux, then you probably really missed two things when you started using Mac OSX, the apt-get command (automatically retrieves software) and the sudo nautilus command (opens file browser ,what finder is, as root. Well, it may not be as clean looking as linux, but you cam run a session of Finder as root by opening terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and typing:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder

and hit ENTER (or return if you run PPC)

This IS CASE-SENSITIVE, one capitalization off, and it will not work, I’d recommend you copy and paste.

So you come across some open source software, and it says something like “Mac binaries are not available right now, there might be some binaries available at…” And of course the binaries (term for mac applications commonly used in the term “Universal Binary” meaning an application that runs on PPC and Intel Macs) are like 2 years old. No No, that wont do will it, we cant have old software. Well, you’re in luck, it is OPEN-SOURCE, that means that you can build it from the source.

Materials Needed:
XCode (for a leopard compatible version see this post)
The Source for the Software (for this example I’ll use mencoder
Terminal (found /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)

Steps:
1) Find the source archive (mine is named mplayer-export-snapshot-1.tar.bz2) and extract it to a folder (just double click on it)
2) Open Terminal
3) Find the folder with the source in Finder (mine is called mplayer-export-2009-10-16) click once on the folder and hit CMD+C (or apple-c if you are running PPC)
4) Now go into the terminal and type “cd” (without quotes) then hit SPACE, then CMD+V, (when I hit CMD+V I had “cd cd /Users/Admin/Downloads/mplayer-export-2009-10-16″)
5) type in “./configure” (without quotes) you’ll get some output which you can probably ignore.
6) now type “make” (without quotes), this will take a very long time, you should probably go somewhere else while you wait.)
7) finally type “sudo make install” it will ask you for a password, type it in (the letters won’t appear as you type them). It will install the package, and you’ll be done!

Note: If you chose to try compiling mencoder, then you can test it by typing “mencoder” into the terminal, if it worked, you’ll get something like “MEncoder SVN-r29770-snapshot-4.0.1 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team
No file given

Exiting… (error parsing command line)” but with a different version, (unless you downloaded it today)

Boot keys are keys you press while a mac is turning on to allow it to do different things.

C = boot from a CD

D = force boot from hardrive

N = Boot from network

T = turns a mac into fire wire exernal hardrive (target disk mode)

CTL+APPLE+SHIFT+POWER = resets power manager

SHIFT = safe boot mode (stops unimportant extentions)

APPLE + V = Verbose Mode

APPLE + S = Single user mode

Update: I forgot the most important one,

OPTION = Choose Boot Camp Partition Or Ext. Boot Drive