[OS X TeX] Assorted unix woes (slightly OT)

Alan Munn amunn at msu.edu
Sun Aug 27 15:21:43 EDT 2006


Hi everyone.  I'm in the midst of setting up a new MacBook Pro, and 
am having some problems with Unix things that worked fine on my 
Powermac machines but  now don't seem to.  This is only partially TeX 
related, so please accept my apologies in  advance, but I know that 
this is a good group to get Unix related info for Mac  (if there is a 
better list for me to send this to, I'd like to know.)

My unix skills are at the "I know enough to be dangerous".  Mainly I 
don't do system admin type things often enough and I therefore just 
forget what I learned previously.  For example, I managed to 
correctly build a new version of emacs from CVS and it works fine, 
but other things seem to be going wrong.

1. Cocoa aspell

I downloaded the new Intel version of Cocoa aspell and it seemed to 
have installed ok.  However, when I open the Spelling preference pane 
it says that the English dictionary failed to compile  because I 
don't have sufficient access privileges.   There is a vague note in 
the documentation about some users reporting problems if their 
default shell is tcsh (which is my case, but there is no further help 
on this.)

2. X11

For independent reasons, I need to use X11, so I installed it from 
the install disks that came with the new MacBook.

X11 loads and I get a working terminal window, but no other 
x-commands works from the command line (or for that matter from the 
applications menu).  E.g. xterm does not create a new x-window.

It seems that the installation has not set the paths correctly.  When 
I check $PATH I get the following;

PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/teTeX/bin/i386-apple-darwin-current

I seem to recall that there should be an X11 path somewhere here too. 
Why didn't this get set when I installed X11?

Now since there are at least 2 users on this machine, I would like to 
fix these things at the system level, not at the individual user 
account.  It seems that I should edit the init files in /etc 
(/etc/csh.cshrc ) etc.  Is this correct, or do I have to edit each 
user's init files separately.  Also, how do I make sure that the 
paths are set correctly independently of the shell I use?

3. man

For some reason, my MANPATH is set to MANPATH=/usr/man:/usr/X11R6/man

which seems right, but when I type e.g.  man man

I get "No manual entry for man"

which is clearly wrong.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Alan


-- 
Alan Munn                                                   amunn at msu.edu
Department of Linguistics
and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages   Fax.  +1-517-432-2736
Michigan State University, East Lansing MI 48824    Tel.  +1-517-355-7491
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