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Thu, 30 Oct 2003
Panther's coolest features
In addition to Panther's major enhancements, there are lots of tiny improvements that show Apple's attention to detail and make it much more pleasant to use. Here are a few of my favorites.
- In Mail.app, clicking on the reply or forward indicator next to a message will open the related message.
- If you use the terminal, there's now a Connect To Server command, which lists ssh, telnet, ftp, and other servers on your local network. Terminal also has a dock menu, which includes that command.
- If you use X11, it also has a dock menu now, which lists all of the windows and lets you start X applications.
- System Preferences now has a dock menu which lets you go to any panel instantly.
- You can now run Software Update directly from the Apple menu.
- For drives which support S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics, Disk Utility will show their status and warn of impeding failure if you click on the drive icon.
Recovering from a corrupted netinfo database
Before installing Panther on my PowerBook, I backed up the drive to an external FireWire drive with Carbon Copy Cloner. When I tried to boot that drive, however, I found that I was dumped to the login screen and my password didn't work. Here's how I recovered it.
First, boot into single user mode by holding down Command-S while booting. You'll get a black text screen with a shell prompt.
Make your disk writable by typing /sbin/mount -uw /
Next, delete the netinfo database with the following commands:
cd /var/db/netinfo
rm -r local.nidb
Finally, continue booting by typing Control-D. When you get to the finder, the setup assistant will run as it does for a new installation. You'll have to create a new user, but your old home directory will still exist and you can access it and change the password from the Accounts system preference panel.
Synchronize your address book without .Mac
Address-O-Sync is a new freeware utility ($5 donation suggested) which lets you synchronize your addressbooks via Rendezvous without using iSync or .Mac.