Life of a Geek Admin

The Daily adventures of a true geek administrator

Life of a Geek Admin - The Daily adventures of a true geek administrator

Tag Archives: Mac

Installing Bluefish 2.2.3 on Mac OSX Lion 10.7

Now that I have started using OSX as another OS I started looking for a good free HTML editor. Of course being a Linux user I always look at OpenSource alternatives.Well, Bluefish is one that popped up.

Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdevelopers, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages

There are several ways to install it using Macports, Fink and native dmg file. Option 1 is the way to go!

Option 1
Get the native dmg file from http://www.bennewitz.com/bluefish/stable/binaries/macosx/. It is a 14 MB download and the current version is 2.2.3.
Installation is as simple as double-clicking on the dmg file to open the archive and dragging the Bluefish icon to the Applications folder.

Option 2
Installing 2.0 Using Macports

Run from Terminal.app
 $ sudo port install bluefish

see https://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk/dports/editors/bluefish/Portfile

Option 3
Installing 2.2 Using Fink

http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/bluefish

Not to hard? Now you are on your way to start coding on OSX!

Converting Adobe Type 1 Fonts AFM for use on Windows 7

Recently ran into an interesting issue where a client had a purchased Adobe Type 1 font the had been using on their Mac OSX systems and need to use the font on their newer Windows systems. Being that the fonts were Adobe Type 1 fonts and only had the .AFM files this was an issue with using the font on a Windows system, so it had to be converted.

This was achieved by using Fondu and AfmToPfm. Fondu was run on the Mac and AfmToPfm on the Windows 7 system.

Download and install Fondu to your Mac, the download is a zipped pkg file and just needs to be extracted and installed. Once installed Fondu will be located in /usr/local/bin. Copy your AFM file to a folder or a folder of your choice. Open a terminal on your Mac, it can be found under Utilities folder in your applications on OSX 10.4 and 10.5, which is all I have at my disposal.

Navigate in terminal to the folder where the the afm file reside and type

ibook-g4$ /usr/local/bin/fondu -afm

And Fondu is off to the races. It will extract what it can find in the files and create bdf, pfb and other afm files it finds. If Fondu asks to overwrite it is fine to allow it to do so. Once complete copy the files to your Windows system using a usb drive or other methods at your disposal.

Now install AfmToPfm to your Windows system and open the application. Click on the Add from folder button or Add Files button and navigate to your folder where the extracted files reside and add them. Click on Create PFM Files and like magic you now have PFM files that can be installed into Windows Fonts.

To install the fonts just right click on the PFM files and click install and they will be added to c:\windows\Fonts directory and available to your applications.

Booting OS X Snow Leopard in 32 bit mode

Recently ran into an issue on a MacBook Pro and programming a Logitech Harmony 900 remote with communication when uploading the new configuration. The Program would just prompt to plugin the remote to the USB and would never recognize it was plugged in. After doing a bit of digging in the forums found the issue was with the Mac OS X drivers from Logitech for Harmony Remote 7.7.0 were 32 bit only.

Currently the only solution is to boot OS X into 32 bit mode. While searching through Apple support I found the solution to reboot the system into 32 bit mode which resolved the issue.

You can use either of these methods:
Method 1: Startup key combination (for current startup only)

  •     If your Mac uses the 32-bit kernel by default, but supports the 64-bit kernel, you can start up using the 64-bit kernel by holding the 6 and 4 keys during startup.
  •     If your Mac uses the 64-bit kernel by default, you can start up with the 32-bit kernel by holding the 3 and 2 keys during startup.

Your Mac will revert to the default kernel the next time you reboot it. This is the method I chose as it is just for that session.

Method 2: On-disk setting (persistent)

To select the 64-bit kernel for the current startup disk, use the following command in Terminal:

sudo systemsetup -setkernelbootarchitecture x86_64

To select the 32-bit kernel for the current startup disk, use the following command in Terminal:

sudo systemsetup -setkernelbootarchitecture i386

Note: This setting is stored in the /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist file and will take effect every time you start up from this disk. If you start up from a different disk, the setting on that disk, or the hardware default, will take effect.
Additional Information

Keys held during startup (such as 3-2 or 6-4, method 1 above) will override the setting in com.apple.Boot.plist (method 2 above).

 

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