Tips and Tricks on Mac

Display X windows on X11.app from another linux box

2009-02-19T17:35:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you might want to ssh to a linux box and be able to fire up X applications and see the X windows on your Mac running X11. However, there are some customizations you need to do before everything works.

Fire up X11.app (It's located in /Applications/Utilities/X11.app)
On Mac box: go to X11 preferences and enable "Allow connections from network clients" (Make sure it looks like below)
Restart X11.app
Open a terminal in X11 and do: xhost +
ssh to your linux box and do: export DISPLAY=IP_OF_MAC_BOX:0.0

Bingo! On the linux box, you can now run any X app, say xterm and the X window will pop up on your Mac box.

Compiling Valgrind for Mac OS X

2009-01-26T16:02:00.001-08:00

I was trying to compile Valgrind (version 3.3.1 r8180, VEX r1854) for Mac OS X as per Greg Parker's instructions.

The make step failed with something like:
gcc -arch i386 -O2 -gstabs -Wmissing-prototypes -Wall -Wshadow -Wpointer-arith -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-declarations -fno-strict-aliasing -O2 -mmacosx-version-min=10.5 -gstabs -fno-stack-protector -O2 -Wno-long-long -Wno-pointer-sign -Wdeclaration-after-statement -nodefaultlibs -nostartfiles -Wl,-u,__start -Wl,-e,__start -Wl,-bind_at_load /usr/lib/dyld -arch i386 -mdynamic-no-pic -Wl,-seg1addr,0xf0080000 -Wl,-stack_addr,0xf0080000 -Wl,-stack_size,0x80000 -Wl,-pagezero_size,0xf0000000 -o memcheck-x86-darwin memcheck_x86_darwin-mc_leakcheck.o memcheck_x86_darwin-mc_malloc_wrappers.o memcheck_x86_darwin-mc_main.o memcheck_x86_darwin-mc_translate.o memcheck_x86_darwin-mc_machine.o memcheck_x86_darwin-mc_errors.o ../coregrind/libcoregrind_x86_darwin.a ../VEX/libvex_x86_darwin.a -lgcc ld: in ../VEX/libvex_x86_darwin.a, archive has no table of contents collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make[3]: *** [memcheck-x86-darwin] Error 1 make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1 make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1 make: *** [all] Error 2

I was able to fix this with:
$ ranlib VEX/libvex_x86_darwin.a

This needs to be repeated with VEX/libvex_amd64_darwin.a which'll fail the same way. Continuing with make built valgrind successfully for me.

Select Startup Disk

2008-03-01T05:44:00.000-08:00

The most common way to select the startup disk is using the "Startup Disk" preference pane. However, there are times when you want to do this using the command line.

$ sudo bless -mount /Volumes/MY_PARTITION -setBoot

Replace MY_PARTITION with the appropriate volume name, and reboot

Reformat a disk partition

2008-02-28T02:40:00.000-08:00

To reformat a disk partition:

$ diskutil reformat /path/to/device

or

$ diskutil reformat /Volumes/[mount point]

Which Mac Version?

2007-08-31T15:39:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick command to figure out the version of Mac.

sw_vers -productVersion