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permissions

Tackling file account association and permissions changes in OS X

When you get information on a file or folder in OS X, you will see a "Permissions" section where a few user and group names are listed, followed by read or write permissions for those names. This method of granting access to files can be relatively straightforward, but many times there will be odd names listed in the permissions field, and people have wondered about them and what they mean.… Read more

'Swiss Army knife' of Mac maintenance

Xupport is another good option for people who want to optimize and fiddle with specific and global settings on their Macs. This multipurpose utility (billed as a "Swiss Army knife" for OS X) can help you navigate files, perform backups, search for Unix commands, and alter a wide array of settings on your Mac, all within a simple interface that's organized around Settings, Maintenance, Optimization, Sharing, Backup, Browser, Unix, and Info. Recent updates bring full support for Snow Leopard (important for a system-tinkering app), better stability for PPC Macs, and better performance for Intel Macs.

You can … Read more

A quick note about the ubiquitous troubleshooting suggestion, repairing permissions

Though many issues with your Mac may indeed only require a simple trip to Disk Utility's repair permissions function, sometimes users find that a list of permissions are found to need repairing and never do. In a recently updated article, Apple outlines many of these permissions messages that you can safely ignore.… Read more

Using Disk Utility from a different version of OS X

Some people have been in situations where they would like to repair their hard drives and permissions on systems that they do not have an installation disk for. For instance, if a friend's computer is running OS X 10.4 and all you have are 10.3 and 10.5 installation DVDs, then the question is whether or not you can safely use these to run maintenance on the system.… Read more

UPDATED: Worried about permissions?

Edited by Joe Aimonetti

First prognosis from those in the know: you probably do not have to be. That's great news for most of us who depend on the error reporting in Disk Utility to determine if our systems are running the way they should be. Many people have noticed that their permissions checks via Disk Utility after updating to Mac OS X 10.5.8 or other updates from Apple have spit out a laundry list of suspect errors.… Read more

Managing permissions to prevent "Forbidden" error with Web Sharing

Written by Topher Kessler

Depending on your account setup, or small modifications you may have done to your home folder, you may prevent people from being able to see any local Web sites you are hosting through the Web Sharing service, and your computer will issue a "Forbidden" error instead of showing the requested Web page.… Read more

When to run Permissions Fixes, Disk Repair, and Cache Cleaning routines

There are a variety of maintenance routines that people can run in OS X, including the disk verification and permissions repair that come with the system, along with scripts such as cache cleaners that are available in third-party utilities. These scripts can be quite useful, but also can give odd-looking output that may concern people and cause them to try extra measures to fix problems, which can lead to unexpected errors.… Read more

Attention Vista users

Simple and straightforward is how we like it, and this free utility delivers. It gives Vista users the ability to easily manage their UAC.

WinCleaner UAC Switch's interface consists of two UAC options, but really, you have three options: to run the UAC in normal mode, to run it in quiet mode, and, finally, to turn off the UAC altogether. No matter your selection, you have to restart your computer for it to take effect. After switching our UAC to quiet mode, we noticed a big difference in the number of administrator permission requests when we tried uninstalling and … Read more

Microsoft once again offering pseudo-open source on CodePlex

Microsoft has been criticized in the past for how it manages CodePlex, Microsoft's "open source project hosting site" (emphasis mine). This time, as The Register reports, Microsoft is hosting code that can only be run on the Windows platform.

This is not, of course, a violation of open source. Plenty of projects on Sourceforge will run on only Linux, or some other operating system.

No, the problem here is that Microsoft is restricting these projects to Windows by license, and not merely be technical capability.

In at least one instance, that of the Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF), Microsoft switched the license from its Windows-only Microsoft Limited Permissive License (Ms-LPL) to the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), an Open Source Initiative-certified license, under pressure from Miguel de Icaza and "community feedback." The reason given for putting the code under the MS-LPL in the first place is lame, however:… Read more