Month: June 2009

bash architecture mismatch in Tiger intel builds

brunerd

Tiger, I know, ancient history…
Well, I’ve stumbled on an old oddity with bash on intel builds of Tiger:
Bash thinks its running on a PPC machine!?
At least the environment variables think so…
$ arch
i386
$ echo $HOSTTYPE
powerpc
$echo $MACHTYPE
powerpc-apple-darwin8.0

This might only affect those who are using Fink or building your apps, or those who like things to be right.

Append these lines to /etc/profile, using sudo nano /etc/profile
HOSTTYPE=i386
MACHTYPE=i386-apple-darwin8.0
export HOSTTYPE
export MACHTYPE

Now the one thing this won’t do is affect the 5th element of the BASH_VERSINFO array, it seems to be readonly… so if you are very adventurous you can go into /bin/bash with a Hex Editor and overwrite the first two ‘powerpc’ references with i386 (the second set of powerpc refs are correct that is the ppc portion of the fat binary), don’t move the start of of string, just pad the end with zeros (NULL) and it will affect this variable as well.

Alright, now it’s in “The Google”

Create a standard .pkg for Acrobat Reader

brunerd

It’s time to patch Acrobat Reader again! And leave it to Adobe to use a patcher app (or Installer Vise, or a downloader, or a some crazy Javascript/XML/AIR based installer) to make things hard for mass deployment to be achieved (and no I don’t think the Deployment Kit for CS4 makes much sense!).

Perhaps soon they’ll have a full version of Reader available for download in a seemingly standard .pkg file, but don’t be fooled! If you admin Macs like I do you might have noticed it uses the iNosso plugin to uncompress it’s payload and it is totally incompatible with ARD’s Install Package. It just fails.

But fear not, I am a big fan of Iceberg and it’s ability to make the painstaking process of installing Adobe apps so much easier. And I want to share the love. So here take this.

I put a small how-to in the zip file with a sparse set of instructions and caveats. Basically you install Acrobat Reader in the normal way, install Iceberg, open the iceberg project, and build. You’ll then have a pkg that ARD can push out.

If you have questions — Google it! ;)
(OK you can leave a comment, but for gawd’s sake not “How do I use this?” — seriously!)