explorers’ club

Since coming on board the mac band wagon, I have run into some brick walls (or rather large columns that take time to circumvent). These are mostly cases where simple scenarios in a Windows environment translate rather poorly in a Mac environment. I think I can truly appreciate the multi-lingual now.

With all the abundant information (and misinformation) out on the web I figured I would compile a quick list of things that I found helpful. Here are some thing I have run into and found simple solutions for:

• Installing mySQL on Leopard – This was originally posted on Stringfoo’s dev blog. His article is specifically tailored to getting PHP and mySQL up and running on Leopard. I only cared to get mySQL running so I stripped it to the bare essentials. This is assuming you have your root password and XCode installed on you system.
  • grab the installer. I grabbed the package download for Mac OS 10.4 x86
  • only install the main installer, not the startup package as Leopard has issues with the control panel
  • open a Terminal window and start mySQL manuall by typing “sudo /usr/local/mysql/support-files/mysql.server start”
  • you can stop it by typing “sudo /usr/local/mysql/support-files/mysql.server stop” (like you didn’t know that).
• simple Linux Bash Commands - I am barely functional in DOS so learning Bash was a double whammy. Thankfully a buddy sent me a link to this helpful list of simple commands.
• show/hide hidden files in Finder – open a Terminal window and enter this to show them (or FALSE at the end of the string to hide them again).
  
  • defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
  • killall Finder
    

  Keep in mind that by enabling this hidden files to reveal themselves, you will start seeing the annoying .DS_store files everywhere you open a Finder view.

• more coming soon as soon as I figure them out.

As for what may be coming soon (which means I am still trying to figure them out) is listed below.  If you know how, shout out at me and I will list it in the above list.  Thanks in advance:

• created Terminal shortcuts (aka aliases) to fire off the mysql start/stop commands so that I don’t have to type the full path.  Everything I have found doesn’t seem to work in Leopard.
• Finding a Mac equivilant to TortoiseSVN shell that works well with Subclipse.  I tried using one that seemed to work independently of subclipse so that it didn’t update the folder SVN icons to indicate something was changed.

Well I hope that this will shave a few minutes or hours off of your hunt to figure these issues out. I will be adding more so stay tuned.