…To MacBook

Here’s another post that will be a short one for mac OS X. The best way to control what will run on startup is to go to System Preferences -> Accounts Pick the user you want to modify the startup list for and choose the “Login Items” tab. You should see something like this:

Account Login Items

At this point just pick the application you want to stop running on startup and click on the “-” sign to remove it from the list.

Recently we’ve started using some packages in java that require us to use Java 1.6 (sometimes refered to as Java 6. Which one is it java, 1.6 or 6? We’re at war, pick a side!). If you have Mac OSX leopard then you should have both 1.5 and 1.6 installed on the system but by default 1.5 is used.

To check which version is being used when you log in, open up terminal and type:

java -version
You should see something like:

java version “1.5.0_16″
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_16-b06-284)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_16-133, mixed mode, sharing)

To switch this to use 1.6 instead, you need to add the following to your .bashrc:

alias java=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Commands/java
export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/

Remember to either exit your terminal and start a new session or just run the command:

source ~/.bashrc

for the changes to take effect.

In the Mac world, what PC users call the touchpad mouse is called the trackpad. When I first got this macbook, I started playing around with some of the settings. Here is a screen shot of my current settings:

If you installed the developer tools on macbook as I did the moment I started it up, you should have VI on your system. I’m used to the syntax highlighting in VI but macs don’t have that enabled by default. You could just run the command:

:syntax onÂ

And immediately you’ll have syntax highlighting. The issue with this method though is that once you quit VI and open a new file, there will be no syntax highlighting and you will need to run the command again.

To have highlighting always enabled, just create or edit the file $HOME/.vimrc and add the following line to it:

:syntax on

Open a new file in VI to test and you should see your code in color.