Mac OS Tutorials

Startup

• “Press X during startup” = Force Mac OS X startup
• “Press Option-Command-Shift-Delete during startup” = Bypass primary startup volume and seek a different startup volume (such as a CD or external disk)
• “Press C during startup” = Start up from a CD that has a system folder
• “Press N during startup” = Attempt to start up from a compatible network server (NetBoot)
• “Press T during startup” = Start up in FireWire Target Disk mode
• “Press Shift during startup” = start up in Safe Boot mode and temporarily disable login items and non-essential kernel extension files (Mac OS X 10.2 and later)
• “Press Command-V during startup” = Start up in Verbose mode
• “Press Command-S during startup” = Start up in Single-User mode

Menu Commands

• “Shift-Command-Q” = Apple Menu Log out
• “Shift-Option-Command-Q” = Apple Menu Log out immediately
• “Shift-Command-Delete” = Finder Menu Empty Trash
• “Option-Shift-Command-Delete” = Finder Menu Empty Trash without dialog
• “Command-H” = Finder Menu Hide Finder
• “Option-Command-H” = Finder Menu Hide Others
• “Command-N” = File Menu New Finder window
• “Shift-Command-N” = File Menu New Folder
• “Command-O” = File Menu Open
• “Command-S” = File Menu Save
• “Shift-Command-S” = File Menu Save as
• “Command-P” = File Menu Print
• “Command-W” = File Menu Close Window
• “Option-Command-W” = File Menu Close all Windows
• “Command-I” = File Menu Get Info
• “Option-Command-I” = File Menu Show Attributes Inspector
• “Command-D” = File Menu Duplicate
• “Command-L” = File Menu Make Alias
• “Command-R” = File Menu Show original
• “Command-T” = File Menu Add to Favorites
• “Command-Delete” = File Menu Move to Trash
• “Command-E” = File Menu Eject
• “Command-F” = File Menu Find
• “Command-Z” = Edit Menu Undo
• “Command-X” = Edit Menu Cut
• “Command-C” = Edit Menu Copy
• “Command-V” = Edit Menu Paste
• “Command-A” = Edit Menu Select All
• “Command-1″ = View Menu View as Icons
• “Command-2″ = View Menu View as List
• “Command-3″ = View Menu View as Columns
• “Command-B” = View Menu Hide Toolbar
• “Command-J” = View Menu Show View Options
• “Command - [” = Go Menu Back
• “Command - ]” = Go Menu Forward
• “Shift-Command-C” = Go Menu Computer
• “Shift-Command-H” = Go Menu Home
• “Shift-Command-I” = Go Menu iDisk
• “Shift-Command-A” = Go Menu Applications
• “Shift-Command-F” = Go Menu Favorites
• “Shift-Command-G” = Go Menu Goto Folder
• “Command-K” = Go Menu Connect to Server
• “Command-M” = Window Menu Minimize Window
• “Command-?” = Help Menu Open Mac Help
• “Command-Space” = Open Spotlight (Mac OS X 10.4 or later)
• “Command-Alt-Space” = Open Spotlight Guide (Mac OS X 10.4 or later)
• “F12″ = Opens Dashboard (Mac OS X 10.4 or later)

Other Commands

• “Option-Command-D” = Show/Hide Dock
• “Command-Tab” = Switch application
• “Command-Up Arrow” = Move up one directory
• “Command-Down Arrow” = Move down one directory
• “Page Up or Control-Up Arrow” = Move up one page
• “Page Down or Control-Down Arrow” = Move down one page
• “Option-Drag” = Copy to new location
• “Option-Command-Drag” = Make alias in new location
• “Command-Drag” = Move to new location without copying
• “Command-C” = Show Colors palette in application
• “Command-T” = Show Font palette in application
• “Command-Shift-3″ = Take a picture of the screen
• “Command-Shift-4″ = Take a picture of the selection
• “Command-Shift-4, then press Control while selecting” = Take a picture of the screen, place in Clipboard
• “Command-Shift-4, then Spacebar” = Take a picture of the selected window
• “Option-Command-esc” = Force Quit
• “Control-Eject” = Restart, Sleep, Shutdown dialog box
• “Control-Command-Eject” = Quit all applications and restart
• “Option-Command-Eject or Option-Command-Power” = Sleep
• “Command-click window toolbar button (upper right corner)” = Cycle through available views for the window’s toolbar (dependant on the nature of the Finder or application window)
• “Command-`” = Cycle through windows in application or Finder (if more than one window is open)
• “Function-Delete (PowerBook, iBook only)” = Forward Delete (delete the character to the right of your cursor)

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Apple today unveiled an all new all-in-one iMac line featuring gorgeous 20- and 24-inch widescreen displays encased in elegant and professional aluminum and glass enclosures. The entire new iMac line features the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors and a new, ultra-thin aluminum Apple Keyboard, built-in iSight video camera for video conferencing and iLife ’08, making it the ultimate digital lifestyle desktop computer for both consumers and professionals.

“This new iMac is the most incredible desktop computer we’ve ever made,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Our new design features the innovative use of materials, including professional-grade aluminum and glass, that are highly recyclable.”

Redefining Apple’s signature all-in-one design, the new iMac integrates the entire computer system into a sleek, professional aluminum enclosure for a striking, clutter-free desktop. An elegant glass cover joins precisely to the aluminum enclosure creating a virtually seamless front surface. The new iMac’s 20- and 24-inch glossy widescreen displays provide incredibly crisp images, ideal for photos and movies using the all new iLife ’08 suite of digital lifestyle applications that are included. The new ultra-thin aluminum Apple Keyboard is just 0.33 inches thin at its front edge. A new optional Apple Wireless Keyboard is a compact design that, with Apple’s wireless Mighty Mouse, offers a cable-free desktop.

You can see the full news here

Make Bandwith Soar

By: Ender

(If you use this on your site, please do not edit anything, including this information at the top.)

File from the Text files section of Undergroundmac.com

***************************************************************************

For those of you who know me well, you know that have I bandwith like no other. In order to achieve this bandwith superiority I did this:

-open the Terminal and type “sudo -s” to access root

-type “sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.recvspace=65536″ then press enter (increases recieve buffer size)

-type “sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.sendspace=65536″ then enter (increase send buffer size)

- type “sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0″ then enter (increase your Mac’s response time)

-type “logout” then enter (if its a login shell)

This hack only works for the current boot up (it will be gone next time you start up) so let’s fix that:

-type “sudo pico /etc/rc”

find the last line that should read “exit 0″
NOTE: The “exit 0″ line is the very last line in the text. You need to hold the down arrow key in order to reach this line.
since we want the effect to take place during all boot ups,

-type the 3 sysctl commands again right above the “exit 0″ line, writing one per line

Results will vary, people’s bandwidth has doubled because of this. Others have seen no noticeable difference. It sure helped me and I hope it give your Mac a nice speed boost too!

Well i decided to collect some tips to get the most of your machine for best gaming experience,mostly these tips give a performance boost on older machines.

ISSUE 1:
Having a clean instalation of the game is worth,because if u have been playing with it long or have been experimenting with the game(eg.tweakin or moding)you can suffer from it.(Defrag the disk too to make it easier for the system to look for files)And if u are reinstalling use APPZAPPER to make sure u delete all files.

Another thing is to always install the games that require high performance in to your main HD.This one is especialy affects the load times of levels
(eg. a level in battlefield 1942 takes about 15-30 seconds more to load than from the main drive)
*The time varies from the speed of your HD(RPM’s) and the type of the conection to the computer:
USB 1.1 and 2 slower(about 30-40 seconds)
FIREWIRE 400 and 800 faster(about 5-10 seconds slower compared to ATA)
ATA=best performance

ISSUE 2:
Having as much free CPU and RAM as possible…

Well before launching a game you should turn of all othe aplications running to get the best performance(eg.turn of launched apps that you see on the dock like Mail and iTunes)
But why not to look further?!If i want it to run even smoother i have to turn of some apps running in the backround.How to do it?
Basically they are 2 ways of doing this:
FIRST:
Start Activity Monitor in the utilities and go to user processes and quit some of them(quiting one app wont do a noticeable boost but quiting ten of them will do)I do not recommend to turn of system proceses unless you know what you are doing but you can quit those like(eg.iTunes helper or Dashboard since Dashboard takes a lot of RAM if you have lots of Widgets in it)
SECOND:
A bit more user-friendly is to use the utility called Gamelauncher

link: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/games/utilities/gamelauncher.html

To get the best experience i recommended using a mix of them,launch Activity Monitor and then launch gamelauncher and launch the game with it.

ISSUE 3:
To get the most of your graphics card you have basically do 2 things:

FIRST:
Staying up to date is critically required,since new drivers are included in Software Update.All latest nVidia and ATI drivers for mac are included in software updates most of them are in the system update.If u arent on latest OS and use older ones like 10.3 i include a link to these latest ATI drivers:http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html
*Staying up to date is critical with the games too,always install latest patches when possible.

SECOND:
*Andvanced ATI cards tweakin:
(Only for Macs with ATI cards)This one is the base of getting the most of your ATI graphics card.To do this we are going to need a utility called ATI DISPLAYS available here: http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/mac/atidisplays4-5-7.html
When u install this little handy app u can fully acces and set up the card for any app.Lets go to 3d and make a simple profile for a game.Try messin around with the settings to get the best performance.
*Note:This application does not change the ingame settings but it sets up the render to load faster at cost of quality or to apply higher visual performance like AA.
Playing with the settings you can really set up how playable the game is.
Here is an example:
CUBE setted up for fast in ATI DISPLAYS:65-72 fps
CUBE without any tweak with ATI DISPLAYS:40-56 fps

Now i know CUBE is not a hardware killer but it is the only one game that i know that has the fps counter,if you know anymore post them here.
The performance boost ist noticeable on every game i tested-BATTLEFIELD(medium setting) felt supperlaggy and choppy when i was shooting and with ATI DISPLAYS on i lost a bit of texture quality but it was playable and without any jerky or choppy scenes.

*See machine specs below
ISSUE 4:
Multiplayer Gaming

The main problem is not that the program you are using is eating about 4megs more of ram (eg. Gameranger) but the problem is choppynes aka LAG.This is the problem of your conection actually the ping(the higher the ping the poorer the game performance).To improve it a bit as many users here said install application named BANDWITHTUNER or search for the scripts by LG(you can also use MACPILOT).Some multiplayer games especially FPS(first person shooters) are extremly GPU and CPU intensive so a bit of tweakin of your GPU might do the trick(read above)In these games the main requirement is SPEED and not visual perfection.This one helped me a lot since the game feels a lot more faster.
*To see a noticeable change from bandwith optimizing you need to have a broadband conection(dial-up users wont see any difference)

Final use notes:
To get the most of this guide the best thing is to use all tips simulateously.

*MACHINE SPECS:
G4 1.25 GHZ
768MB RAM
ATI RADEON 9200
160GB 7200RPM MAXTOR HD
OS X TIGER

Source: codez4mac

When you start up your mac and the login window pops up, you have a big shiny apple logo and the words Mac OS X. Below these words you usually see the name of your mac, whatever that may be. For most people that isn’t very useful, as you have to have a lot of the same models knocking around to get confused between computers, and luckily since Mac OS X 10.4.3, this line has been made much more informative.

Since this version, you can click on the name of your mac to show different statistics about your machine. Each time you click, it will cycle through different bits of information that are particularly useful when troubleshooting problems.

The order of the statistics are as follows:

One click: Your OS X version number (e.g. Version 10.4.7)
Two clicks: Your OS X build number (e.g. Build 7M271)
Three clicks: Your mac’s serial number (e.g. WN1511LHKNW)
Four clicks: Your mac’s IP address (e.g. 196.254.0.1)
Five clicks: The status of any networked account
Six clicks: The date and time (e.g. Saturday, January 20 2007 4:02:31 AM GMT)
Seven clicks: Back to where you started, the name of your computer.

So you click a few times and set the information line to your favourite thing, but next time you log in, it has changed back to the name of your mac. To change the bit of information that appears first, you need to do a bit of tinkering in the Terminal (Applications/Utilities). Open Terminal and type the following command:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow AdminHostInfo info_name

Depending on which piece of information you want displayed, replace info_name with one of the following:

SystemVersion
SystemBuild
SerialNumber
IPAddress
DSStatus
Time

After doing this, hit return, and the next time you view your login window the information you chose will be displayed.

Source: macosxtips

There are a couple ways you can go about this process. If your songs are too quiet you can adjust their volume in iTunes.

This is easily done with selecting the songs you want to boost (Control+Click, Shift+Click or ).

Control+Click or right click and select Get Info. Select the checkbox and slide the volume bar up to 100%. Select OK and your songs will be updated. Be sure to sync your iPod with the new songs.

If your iPod is too quiet, there is a program out there called goPod that will increase it’s volume.

Source: mactips

To make it easier to view your photos in glorious full screen, go the General area of the iPhoto preferences. There you can choose to “Edit photo - Using Full Screen”. This will allow you to view any photo in full screen simply by double clicking its thumbnail in the organize view.

Source: Apple KB.

Creating an image from an existing disc.

1) Insert the disc into your drive, and let it mount on the desktop. Close any windows that it opens.

2) Launch Disk Utility from the Utilities sub-folder of your Applications folder. In the left hand section of the window, there is a tree of each drive you have, and what disk or partitions it has. Select (highlight) the your CD or DVD drive (the drive option, not the indented disc listing).

3) From the File menu, select the New option that has a sub menu (in OS X 10.4, it is the second option from the top). When the submenu appears, choose the “New Image from Device” choice, it should be the bottom option in that list.

4) A save dialog will appear. Name the image, select the location you want to save it to (take note of it for later). Choose “Compressed” from the Image Format pulldown list on the bottom of this dialog, and pick “none” from the “Encryption” drop down. These should be the default options. Click Save.

5) A progress dialog will appear, and it will take a few moments for the image creation process to complete. When it does, there should be a new icon on the left side of the Disk Utility window with the name you gave the image.

Burning an image to a CD/DVD.

1) Launch Disk Utility from the Utilities sub-folder of your Applications folder. In the left hand section of the window, there is a tree of each drive you have, and what disk or partitions it has. If the icon for the image you want to burn is not shown there, drag it from Finder into that section of the Window.

2) Highlight the image you want to burn from the left hand section of the Disk Utility window. Click the Burn icon in the Toolbar (the radiation looking icon). A Burn Options sheet will drop down from the top of Window.

3) While you can play around with the settings in the Burn Options sheet, I suggest that you set the Speed pull down to “Maximum Possible”, and uncheck the “Verify burned data” checkbox. Using these setting swill allow the burn to take the least amount of time. Click Burn in the lower right of that sheet.

4) A Burn Progress dialog will appear and it will take a few moments for the burn process to complete. When it completes, your new completed burned disc should either eject from the drive, or mount on the desktop (whichever option you chose on the Burn Options sheet). Enjoy your new CD/DVD.

This information is also available in Apple’s Knowledge Base:
Burning a disk image file on a CD or DVD in Mac OS X