We’ve been playing with the new MacBook for a few days now, and thus far everything seemed very cool. After reinstalling MacOSX, we gained a lot of disk space because we ditched most of the printer drivers, garageband and a few other space hogs. We installed Adium, MplayerOSX, configured Mail.app, set up the home-banking stuff, etc. So, all was well. Or so we thought.
Forward four days. My girl would like to fiddle around with MySQL and PHP, so I decided to get Fink off teh internets. That way, we could get all the goodies we wanted. It was the picking of the fruit in the Garden, it seemed. The installer refused to finish, although when I checked the /sw directory tree, it looked pretty much ok. Thus. Kill the installer, check the logs. Nothing strange. Ah well, perhaps we can now install XCode, and I’ll check what went wrong later, I thought. No can do, the XCode installer told me. I tailed the logs, I retried, and I only got the same message indicating that somewhere, something was not ok. Permission denied. Being a relative newbie myself, I ls’d through the directory tree, but it seemed all right. Not true, I later found out. After a reboot (yeah, yeah) and a few failed attempts, I tried to start the Activity Monitor application. Nope. Nothing. Nil. Nada. Didn’t start, though it was running fine before the reboot.
In the end googling around, chatting on #macosx, I found out what the problem was. It turned out that the permissions of several files can be fubar’d when an installer runs, or, as teh internets put it: ‘run Disk utility to fix permissions after installing’. Fired it up. Checked permissions. They were fubar, that was certain. Fixing them involved running the Disk Utility by sudo. In the end it all worked out. After the permissions were fixed, the XCode installer did what it was supposed to do, and I ran the pathsetup goodie from Fink.
But the question remains this: what can possibly require an installation script to change file permissions on files it need not touch? I was in love with Mac OSX before. After this event, I’ve cooled down a bit.