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Posts Tagged ‘Mac OSX’

BackTrack in VMWare guide finally updated

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

The title pretty much says it all, after much procrastinating (read: schoolwork) on my part, I’ve gotten around to updating my guide for installing BackTrack in VMWare Fusion.

If you’ve been just WAITING to install BackTrack, but couldn’t find a guide that was correct for installing the latest VMWare tools, your time has come. Here’s the new, 100% updated guide. As a side note, in the process I’ve upgraded to the latest WordPress and NexGen Gallery plugin. Hooray :)

Disabling spotlight in Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

While the new spotlight in Leopard is much more powerful than it was in Tiger, there are still those of us that would rather not have our system eating up system resources. Unfortunately, adding “SPOTLIGHT=-NO-” to /etc/hostconfig no longer does anything.

To disable spotlight (non-destructively), open up Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app), and execute the following two commands:

(This will disable the spotlight indexing)

(This will remove spotlight from your menu bar)

If at any time you want to re-enable spotlight, simply run disk utility, and have it fix permissions on your boot drive.

Disclaimers:
* You should probably reboot after running those two commands.
* Doing this will disable any features that explicitly depend on spotlight, such as searching mail content.
* I believe that disabling spotlight will break Time Machine. If this is wrong, or there’s a way around it, let me know!