Display X windows on X11.app from another linux box

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.

1. Fire up X11.app (It's located in /Applications/Utilities/X11.app)
2. On Mac box: go to X11 preferences and enable "Allow connections from network clients" (Make sure it looks like below)
3. Restart X11.app
4. Open a terminal in X11 and do: xhost +
5. 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

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

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

To reformat a disk partition:

$ diskutil reformat /path/to/device

or

$ diskutil reformat /Volumes/[mount point]

Which Mac Version?

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

sw_vers -productVersion