I Hate My Computer Tonight.

[Tom Scharpling]

For a very petty reason, I changed the name of the home folder on my Mac (10.4). Now everything is completely fucked. I spent over three hours on IM with poor Mel, who had to deal with my panicked stupidity.

Apparently this is the one thing you should never do on a Mac. Now I have all my important shit stuck in a new folder while the existing main folder is empty. All the apps open like they've never been used before.

It's fucking ridiculous. Has anybody ever bounced back from this nightmare? And don't believe the people online who tell you to 'just swap the names on the old and new folder'. The computer automatically spits out a new folder with the swapped name.

I didn't have the time for this and yet here I am, up at 4:04 AM. My car dies on Friday and my computer pulls a vanishing act on Monday. Great.

Tom.

And THANK YOU to Mel, who gave his night to me and this dumb situation.

[dave from knoxville]

Hi Tom, I sent you a link via direct Twitter message that describes a fix for what sounds like the same problem. Good luck.

[yesno]

The rename trick works only if you do it as root, which means you have to first turn on your root account, and then, as root, fix all the permissions on the renamed folder.  That's definitely Genius Bar shit.

I really really really recommend you upgrade your machine and start using Time Machine.  You are always going to run into problems if you don't have a backup of 100% of everything that is constantly updated.  Time Machine would have been able to roll you back.  Alternatively, use Dropbox for your most important files, which works like iDisk but better, and is free and cross platform.

[ian]

there's no root command like sudo in osx?

it seems weird to have to go to the genius bar so someone else can log into your computer as root

but what do i know

[yesno]

there's no root command like sudo in osx?

it seems weird to have to go to the genius bar so someone else can log into your computer as root

but what do i know

There is sudo, but that involves telling a non Unix wizard to use the terminal.  I'm sure that's what the Genius Bar does.  You can't run GUI apps with sudo.*

If you create the root account, you can log in to the GUI as root. 

*I just checked doing "sudo open /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app"; the actual executable file which is actually inside the .app bundle (/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder) *can* be launched as root but this doesn't do anything but spawn a meaningless process.  This is unlike, say Gnome where you can launch Nautilus as root from a user account.

[buffcoat]

Now that we're at some removal from the incident, I'm curious as to what the very petty reason for changing the folder name was.

[Steve of Bloomington]

I remember I once hosed up my MacBook good and there was some boot option you could use to bypass the usual login and boot into the shell as root and do whatever you needed to do.

Did the Genius Bar people do something like that?

[dave from knoxville]

Does Babelfish convert this language you are speaking into English?

[Steve of Bloomington]

Why don't you babelfish it and find out?

[dave from knoxville]

Why don't you babelfish it and find out?

There's not an option to convert from "crazy moon language".

[yesno]

Dave, a math teacher of all people should know computer talk.

I remember I once hosed up my MacBook good and there was some boot option you could use to bypass the usual login and boot into the shell as root and do whatever you needed to do.

You can boot into console mode as a normal user, yes, but root is disabled by default.  Any administrator can turn it on, though.

[Steve of Bloomington]

Actually I gotta stand up for Dave on this one (after being sort of rude earlier).

Back in my math days I made a point of avoiding computers as much as possible (I was a 'pure math' guy).

It's only because I've sold out that I have learned the crazy moon language.

Much respect to DfK for staying true to the math!

Dave, a math teacher of all people should know computer talk.

I remember I once hosed up my MacBook good and there was some boot option you could use to bypass the usual login and boot into the shell as root and do whatever you needed to do.

You can boot into console mode as a normal user, yes, but root is disabled by default.  Any administrator can turn it on, though.

[yesno]

Did you guys used to live in Dune?

[Steve of Bloomington]

The movie or the book? In my case, the book.

[buffcoat]

Did you guys used to live in Dune?

The sleeper must... awaken.



How many ellipses would it take to script out the actual dialogue from that movie?  There were so many dramatic pauses I thought I was watching summer stock.