Moving your home folder to another disk (or moving it back)

In the older times, with "Mack OSe 9," many users chose to keep their personal files, work, and documents on a different physical disk from their startup disk. It was a safety measure: If one disk goes down, at least the other won't. There was no structural reason to keep files in a particular disk location, other than keeping them out of the System Folder.

I visited a client yesterday whose drive scheme was set up exactly like this, and he wanted to be (finally) upgraded to Leopard. I wasn't sure how Leopard would handle the fact that his Users folder had been moved to a different drive, so (knowing I had backups of his entire system) I cautiously proceeded with the installation.

After the installer finished, Leopard had created a fresh, blank Users folder on the startup disk with a home folder bearing the same username. This wasn't exactly the answer I was looking for. I had to link, somehow, the new Users/hisname folder with his existing user folder on the other volume.

Turns out, Leopard handles this much better than previous versions of Mac OS X. Read on to find out how.

In fact, it's as easy as opening System Preferences, holding the Control key and clicking (or right-clicking) on the account you want to change, and selecting Advanced Options.

You can see that you can easily browse for the user's existing home folder by clicking Choose next to the Home Directory field. Restart the computer, and it's done and dusted. Thanks to our own Michael Rose for this tip.

Hopefully, when you log in, the user's old Desktop, Dock, and everything else is in its place. You can then safely delete /Users/fred in the Finder by throwing it in the Trash. Note that this only changes the path for Fred's home folder; any subsequent users that you create will get home folders in the usual /Users path on the startup disk.

Now, a word of caution. In the past, some security and software updates have been confused by the fact that a user's home folder isn't on the startup disk. While most of the time there shouldn't be a problem, this user's system configuration is now an edge case, and that's where problems crop up. That's why I don't really recommend setting up a client's computer this way. If you're comfortable with the risk, then go for it.

For the truly nerdcore among us, you can also do this via the Directory Services command-line utility: dscl. Note that dscl requires root privileges, so you'll need to preface the command with 'sudo' to get it to work.

When you run dscl, the next step is to navigate to the correct directory within the Directory Services hierarchy (not a literal directory on the disk, mind), and change the value for the user's home folder. In this example, the user's name is fred, the user's new, blank home folder that Leopard created is /Users/fred and his old (correct) home folder on another volume is /Volumes/External Drive/Users/fred. [Line wraps are marked with », that command should go on one line. -- Ed.]

sudo dscl localhost
cd /Local/Default/Users
change fred dsAttrTypeNative:home /Users/fred »
"/Volumes/External Drive/Users/fred"
exit

Restart the computer, and you're good to go. You can remove the empty user folder on the startup disk by dropping into Terminal and typing sudo rm -R /Users/fred and pressing return.

My client eventually wants to change this partition scheme back to a more traditional installation. He also wants to move his data onto one large physical disk instead of two small ones (now that he has Time Machine as his safety net). When we migrate his data onto one disk, we can run this command in reverse to point his username to his home folder on the new, large startup disk.

Tip & Tricks : Highlight items in gridded stacks [ MacOS ]

The Dock's Stacks feature lets Leopard users view a folder's worth of stuff with one click. You'll either love it or hate it, use it or not. If you do use it, here's a little tip that improves it slightly.When you've got a bunch of files from a Stack displayed in Grid View, it can be hard to spot the particular one you're looking for,specially if many of them look identical (such a collection of text files or word processor documents).

Luckily, there's a highlight you can switch on, that puts a whiter background around the file you're mousing over. It makes it slightly easier to ensure you click on the correct file. The highlight appears normally if you use the arrow keys to move around a Grid, or if you type Command and the first letter of one of the files displayed. But this trick switches it on permanently, so that it is always in action whether or not you use these keyboard shortcuts.

Read on for all the commands.
Switching the highlight on and off is easy. You can either type a short pair of commands command into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilte-stack -boolean yes
killall Dock

Tips : Highlight items in gridded stacks [ MacOS ]

The Dock's Stacks feature lets Leopard users view a folder's worth of stuff with one click. You'll either love it or hate it, use it or not. If you do use it, here's a little tip that improves it slightly (in my opinion).

When you've got a bunch of files from a Stack displayed in Grid View, it can be hard to spot the particular one you're looking for, especially if many of them look identical (such a collection of text files or word processor documents).

Luckily, there's a highlight you can switch on, that puts a whiter background around the file you're mousing over. It makes it slightly easier to ensure you click on the correct file.

The highlight appears normally if you use the arrow keys to move around a Grid, or if you type Command and the first letter of one of the files displayed. But this trick switches it on permanently, so that it is always in action whether or not you use these keyboard shortcuts.

Read on for all the commands.
Switching the highlight on and off is easy. You can either type a short pair of commands command into Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilte-stack -boolean yes
killall Dock

(Repeat that with "no" instead of "yes" to put things back the way they were.)

Or, if you'd rather stay away from Terminal, use Alcor's Secrets prefpane to switch it on and off (go to Dock, and check "Hightlight stack items on hover"). Secrets does come with some warnings that you could break things terribly if you're not careful, which is true. But you'll be careful, won't you?

spell check errors [ MacOS ]

There's a funny post at The Apple Blog today that points out a few typos that give Mac OS X Leopard's built-in spell checker a bit of trouble.

For instance, the error "instrucitons" suggests "isntrucitons" as well as "instructions", and "applicaticataion" when "applicatication" is typed instead of "application." There are a few more in their list.

I've noticed that my iPhone always suggests "he'll" when I want to type "hell" (yes, I type "hell" enough to have noticed this).

Of course, this is simple to fix. You can correct these errors for good by right-clicking (or Control-click) on the correct spelling and select "Learn spelling" from the contextual menu. Use this same method to add uncommon words, like surnames, etc.

Apple readies 10.5.5 developer seed

AppeInsider is reporting that developers may receive their seeds of Mac OS X 10.5.5 as soon as this weekend, calling it a "maintenance and security update." They go on to say that the 10.5.5 Leopard update could provide support for those new notebooks we've been hearing about.

Apple released their last update (10.5.4) on June 30th. 10.5.4 included bug fixes and provided the framework for Apple's MobileMe webservice.

Apple Security update 2008-005 released

Apple has just released a new security update for client and server users of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard). This Security update 2008-005 is "recommended for all users and improves the security of Mac OS X," and includes fixes for a dozen or so features in Mac OS X.

This update fixes a QuickLook bug where loading a malicious Microsoft Office file could lead to "arbitrary code execution." Doesn't sound too good to me! It also fixes a DNS vulnerability that has been highly discussed over the past week (and which many other vendors have already patched).

You can download this update by opening Software Update (Apple menu > Software Update). You can also find more information on what this update fixes by looking at Apple's support note.