OSX is Apple’s UNIX based operating system and GUI that has been sold since 2002 as a replacement for the classic Mac OS which ended at version 9. This section contains tips and tricks and howtos for using OSX. I have been using OSX as my day to day desktop and development environment since June 2010.
I recently reinstalled the operating system on my MacBookPro and discovered when trying to SSH into a new server for the first time I was getting the error "Failed to add the host to the list of known hosts (/Users/chris/.ssh/known_hosts)." This post shows what I needed to do to fix them problem.
I frequently need to change the DNS servers I use on my Mac and it can be quite a convoluted process to switch them around using the GUI settings. This post shows how quickly you can change between DNS server settings from the command line using terminal.
When you take screenshots on Mac OS X there’s a shadow around the screenshot by default. This post shows how to disable the shadow from the screenshot and how to subsequently restore the shadow.
I’ve posted in the past about using the "purge" command line utility on Mac OSX to free up inactive memory but a recent update appears to have broken the tool from working. An alternative is to use the FreeMemory app from the App Store to do the same thing, but more easily.
Spotlight is a useful Mac app for launching apps, finding files and other stuff on your computer, and a whole bunch of other nifty little things. Since upgrading to Lion I’ve been finding it doing some serious CPU hogging for long periods of time while it updates its index, and because I use very few of the features I decided to switch Spotlight’s indexing off.
Apple Mac OS X is generally good at memory management but I sometimes find the inactive memory takes a long time to be released as free memory and my system can grind to a bit of a halt if I need to start up a virtual machine. This post shows how to use the purge command to free up the inactive memory.