applejack
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AppleJack startup utility now works with Snow Leopard
In the hustle and the bustle of last week's full-court press press, there was a bit of Mac news worthy of mention: the indispensable AppleJack single-user utility has been updated for compatibility with Snow Leopard. If you never need AppleJack, you'll be happier, but if and when you do need it there's no doubt it can save your sanity (and your Mac). Developed by Kristofer Widholm with an assist from Steve Anthony, the AppleJack utility can only be run when you boot your Mac into single-user mode (by holding down the S and Command keys during startup). It will allow you to clean caches, run repairs and generally happy-make your unhappy Mac. The tool is open-source and free, so go get it. [hat tip to TidBITS]
Ask TUAW: Key remapping in Boot Camp, iPad tethering, file-sharing with a media extender, and more
Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we deal with some technical issues on our production Mac before turning to questions about Windows key remapping in Boot Camp, sharing files with a LaCie media extender, downloading images in Safari, recovering from a hard drive failure, and more. As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify), or if it's an iPhone-related question, which iPhone version and OS version you have.
"Utility of last resort" AppleJack updated for Leopard compatibility
You may sincerely wish never to need it, but if you run into a situation where your Mac refuses to boot fully to the Finder and you don't have any boot-capable utilities to tackle the problem, Kristofer Widholm's AppleJack is probably your best friend in the trenches. The single-user-mode tool is only available if you start your machine while holding down Cmd-S to boot to the command line (as per Dave's tip from yesterday), but once there it streamlines the process of checking your disk for errors, repairing permissions, cleaning caches, zapping corrupt preference files, and deleting leftover virtual memory swap data. You could do most of this yourself via a series of commands, but AppleJack is a) much, much simpler and b) completely free and open source.For a long while it didn't look as though AppleJack would make the leap from Tiger to Leopard, as Mac OS X 10.5 made some key changes that broke AppleJack's functionality (specifically, the 'id' command didn't work, and the /etc/rc file was removed). Developer Steve Anthony jumped into the project this summer and was able to code around the Leopard-specific problems, finally giving us back our beloved AppleJack in version 1.5. Let's all raise a glass of the original Jersey Lightning to Kristofer and Steve for their work on behalf of Mac troubleshooters everywhere.
AppleJack 1.4.3rc3 adds Intel support
AppleJack, the wildly popular open source, single user mode troubleshooting tool for Macs, has finally been updated to support Intel-based Macs. Version 1.4.3rc3, a release candidate, is downloadable now on sourceforge and the final version is expected within the week.Besides Intel compatibility, the following tweaks have been made to the new version: Added an automated uninstaller routine, to enable easy and almost foolproof uninstallation of AppleJack. Added /var/root/Library/Caches to the system cache cleanup routine. Experimental expert mode exists, but is currently hidden until it can be tested further. (see Appendix B of the Read Me). The only well-tested options at this point are the memory test using the included Memtest utility, and the option to disable auto login. Improved the internal coding of user-input prompts. Uses a standardized interface for these functions now. The preference file check now uses a null byte character to separate files rather than an arbitrary "improbable" string. I'm just giddy about this. Integrating Memtest is a nice bonus since I use it all the time. Instead of launching Rember, which is a graphical interface for Memtest (proving my command-line phobia once again), I can just add it to my AppleJack routine. Thanks, Apotek, for your continued development of the troubleshooting tool I use the most!
