Nuts and Bolts

MacOS

  • Building a Signed Package With the Luggage

    Posted on 1 min

    Recently I wanted to be able to sign a package that I was building with The Luggage. Since The Luggage is calling pkgbuild to build the package, I took a look at the pkgbuild documentation and determined that the following argument was needed : --sign "Common name of signing cert" The question then became : how to add this to my Makefile? Taking a look at luggage.make I saw that PB_EXTRA_ARGS is the variable used to contain the arguments for the pkgbuild command.
  • Enabling Syntax Highlighting for Vim in Mac OS X

    Posted on 2 mins

    Mac OS X ships with the vim editor, which supports syntax highlighting. By default, however, syntax highlighting is not turned on. Fortunately it is not hard to enable it. Settings for vim are controlled by two files, one controlling settings globally and the other controlling settings for the user. /usr/share/vim/vimrc is the file that will control the global settings. changes made to this file will affect all users of the machine.
  • Packaging a LaunchAgent Script With the Luggage

    Posted on 2 mins

    Previously, I showed how to install Luggage, and how to package a drag and drop app . In this installment, we will look at how to package up a LaunchAgent script. We will work with a simple script to mount a couple of file shares when a user logs into their computer. To set it up as a LaunchAgent, we need two pieces. First, the script itself (connectshares.sh) needs to be copied to /Library/Scripts/Myorg and everyone should have read and execute permissions.
  • Packaging a Drag and Drop Application

    Posted on 3 mins

    In a previous post , I showed how to get started by getting Luggage setup. In this post we will create a simple package based on a .app bundle. Drag and drop applications are really user friendly to install, the user simply needs to drag them to the Applications folder. They are not as nice, however, for the system administrator who wishes to deploy the application via some automated tool. In some cases it is desirable to repackage these application into an installer package.
  • Getting Started With the Luggage

    Posted on 2 mins

    When administering and or deploying Mac OS systems, it becomes very useful to be able to create packages. This can be to repackage an app to automate deployment, or package up scripts or configuration files. One such tool to do this is The Luggage. Written by Joe Block, it is a command line tool that makes use of Apple’s Packagemaker as well as Make. More information can be found here .
  • Interactive Script to Join Mac OS 10.7 to Active Directory

    Posted on 1 min

    According to this document from Apple : http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4176 You may have trouble using the Directory Utility if your domain is setup such that the Netbios name and host name are not the same. This is the situation I find myself in, so I thought I would post a sample script to help others out… The script can be found here