On 12/19/02 9:43, Dan Crutcher wrote <<an attached html file>>
>Ward: > >Yes, the install and archive did the trick, and kept all my preferences >set the way I had them. It is nice (so far). > >How does one log in as root? I gather that that allows one to pretty much >trash the system if you do things wrong? Any particular actions I should >be wary of? if things are in folder called Previous System on your boot disk, just do this inside terminal sudo rm -rf Previous\ System (Explanation for those not used to the 'fun' of unix commands: 'sudo' is "super user do one" (my guess, not official) which lets you run the command as root without being root. It's best not to log in as root if you don't absolutely have to (and you don't here). 'rm" is remove -rf is "recurse folders". Recursion means that it feeds the rm command to each folder contained in the folder you named, and those folders within the enclosed folders, etc. Why is this needed? rm is really for removing files rather than folders. The folders option is needed to remove the folders themselves. the \ in the file name is so that the shell (the thing that runs the commands) will use the space in a file name instead of thinking that Previous and Folder are two separate entities. ) >And I would love to know, or at least to have a good idea of what caused >the problems I had. In Mac OS's prior to X, I could always eventually >figure out what was causing problems, whether it was an extension >conflict, a bad preferences file, a munged desktop file or whatever, but >with X I don't really know what's going on under the hood. I also have >tools, like Norton Disk Doctor and Tech Tool Pro that have been able to >fix almost any problem I've encountered in 9 and below. I'd guess a bad preference file was the problem (even if there were disk errors - they might have happened after the fact). I'm not really good at diagnosing problems in OS X yet, but I've found that trashing preferences still works wonders for many bugs. Bill The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be January 28 For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
