Re: [coldsync-hackers] An idiot and his Mac

[Andrew Arensburger <arensb+CShackers@ooblick.com>]

[Cory: I wrote a lot of this down way back when, but it looks as if it
never went out, and then I deleted it. I believe you volunteered to
write a HOWTO for MacOS. I hope you can use some of what follows.]

On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 03:05:30PM -0800, Lars Bell wrote:
> Multiple palms (mostly plam III series) dialing into an isp
> Each being able to coldsync with a mac running coldsync in daemon mode

	This ought to be possible, but unfortunately I can't give you
much help with this. In particular, you'll have to set up the bit
about dialing in yourself. If you can get to a shell prompt from a
Palm, I might be able to help.

> The first question I have is what are the directories usr and etc 
> referring to?  I do not seem to have such folders or directories.  Do 
> I need to create them?  Where?  is there a different Mac equivalent?

	/usr and /etc are from Unix. /usr contains most of the
operating system, or at least the read-only parts (programs,
libraries, etc.). /etc contains configuration files.
	In particular, by convention /usr/local contains stuff that
has been installed locally (i.e., wasn't part of the vendor's
distribution).
	I suspect that MacOS X has something similar, but different. I
don't know what it is, though.

> 2nd question:  How do I "uninstall"?

	You delete the files that were installed by 'make install'.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Unix. :-(
	These days, a lot of Unixes have package-management utilities
that allow you to easily uninstall a package, but these generally need
to be told about each package, and I'm not aware of anyone having done
this for MacOS X.
	Fortunately, you've saved the output from 'make install',
which tells you what it did:

> ./../mkinstalldirs /usr/local/bin
> /usr/bin/install -c -m 555 coldsync /usr/local/bin/coldsync
> Skipping /Library/Perl/ColdSync.pm (unchanged)
> Skipping /Library/Perl/ColdSync/.DS_Store (unchanged)
> Skipping /Library/Perl/ColdSync/SPC.pm (unchanged)
> Installing /usr/share/man/man3/ColdSync.3
> Installing /usr/share/man/man3/ColdSync::SPC.3
> Writing /Library/Perl/darwin/auto/ColdSync/.packlist
> Appending installation info to /System/Library/Perl/darwin/perllocal.pod
> ./../mkinstalldirs /usr/local/libexec/coldsync /usr/local/man/man1
> for i in send-mail todo-text; do \
>          /usr/bin/install -c -m 555 $i.inst /usr/local/libexec/coldsync/$i; \
>          rm -f $i.inst; \
> done
> for i in send-mail todo-text; do \
>          /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 $i.1 /usr/local/man/man1/$i.1; \
> done

	So you need to delete:
	/usr/local/bin/coldsync
	/usr/local/bin (if it's empty)
	Everything listed in /Library/Perl/darwin/auto/ColdSync/.packlist
	/usr/local/libexec/coldsync/send-mail
	/usr/local/libexec/coldsync/todo-text
	/usr/local/libexec/coldsync (if it's empty)
	/usr/local/man/man1/send-mail.1
	/usr/local/man/man1/todo-text.1
	/usr/local/man/man1 (if it's empty)

	You may also want to consider using something like
		./configure --prefix=/Local
which tells 'configure' that your local software is installed under
/Local. 'make install' will then install executables in /Local/bin,
manual pages in /Local/man, and so forth.
	In particular, if you use something like
		./configure --prefix=/Local/ColdSync
then everything will be installed in /Local/ColdSync so that you can
just blow away the installation by deleting that directory. (This is
the simple version; it's also possible to get fancy, but I'll spare
you that for now.)

> Below you will see the output from a install and make that I tried. 
> Following that will be a complete spec printout for my mac (just as a 
> reference.)  The only thing that I've learned so far is that it seems 
> necessary to use the command "sudo", but I'm not sure why.

	According to what you wrote, you needed to use 'sudo' to
install ColdSync. This is normal. Unix permissions are quite a bit
more strict than in MacOS 1 through 9; you can't just do whatever you
want, whenever you want (this also means that if you run a
virus-infected program as yourself (not as root), it can delete all of
your work files, but won't reformat the disk).

	You'll run into this issue again later, when ColdSync tries to
read and write the serial device.
	The simple solution is to change the permissions and/or
ownership of the device so that you can read and write it. Many Unixes
have some way of saying, "Change the ownership of /dev/foo to the user
who has logged in on the console." This is a better solution, IMO, but
I don't know how to do this under MacOS X (anyone feel like buying me
a PowerBook so I can learn this stuff? :-) )

> [localhost:~/trial coldsync/coldsyncX/coldsync-2.1.2] larsbell% coldsync
> Error: Can't open "/dev/palm".
> open: No such file or directory
> Error: Can't open connection.

	This says, quite simply, that there's no /dev/palm , which is
the default device. I'm not sure what the MacOS X serial device is,
but it might be one of:

	/dev/ttyd.printer
	/dev/ttyd.modem
	/dev/cu.<something>
	/dev/tty.<something>

-- 
Andrew Arensburger                      This message *does* represent the
arensb@ooblick.com                      views of ooblick.com
      "Bother!" said Pooh, as he backed up onto the wrong tape.
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