Elton One

Solution:

Install X11 from your OS X install disc. The downloads from the Apple site DO NOT WORK.
If you don’t have your disc try this link for download locations of X11 that work.

I wanted to install X11 to run Eagle (a PCB layout editor) but in the past I have seen that X11 needs to be installed to run Open Office.

According to Apple:

“X11 for Mac OS X is compatible, fast, and fully integrated with Mac OS X”

From http://developer.apple.com/opensource/tools/X11.html

Hmm.. Is it now?

X11 is not installed by default with OS X although you can select to do this. Searching the Apple download site for ‘X11′ links through to this page. The install from this location DOES NOT WORK and always tells you there is a more recent version installed (which in my case there is clearly not). The 1.3 update here does the same .

To get around this luckily you can install X11 from your OS X install disc. Open the disc, scroll down and run the Optional Installs package, choosing to install only X11. I read here that installing the X11 SDK installs additional libraries so I installed this too by running X11SDK.pkg located in XCode Tools/Packages. After this to run X11 in Terminal you can type

open /Applications/Utilities/X11.app

Then launch what ever X11 application you are using. This worked fine for me!

The fact Apple has not picked up on this or rectified the problem reflects on their sustained lack of development of existing bugs and problems with their OS in favour of adding whistles and bells. And that’s why Open Source will win the day.

I have for some time been using Transmission for downloading torrent files. I really like the application for a number of reasons; it’s simple and functional, it’s free, it’s open source and it works really well.

I have however discovered a little issue, or more a behaviour that can be counter productive on occassion. I have been using Transmission installed on a drive which contains the application and all my torrents and torrent files. This has worked fine for ages, but for some reason a while ago I opened Transmission up to find all my torrent files were still there, but had 0% downloaded (despite when I quit it last some of them were nearly complete). I couldn’t understand this, and the files themselves were the correct size, and not 0%. Very confusing. I started off the torrents again and no problem, but I did have to start again.

Then the other week, I couldn’t find Transmission. No idea what happened, possibly I deleted it when deleting torrent files. This made me think of what happened before, and I had no intention of starting some of the files I had downloading again, so I resolved to find out how I could re-install transmission but keep the torrent files in the same place and have them continue from where they left off.

Luckily enough it turns out that if you copy /User/??/Library/Application Support/Transmission and save it somewhere safe then re-install Transmission (I used to have mine in another folder and this time I installed it to Applications - everything was fine), open the application, quit it then replace the folder at /User/??/Library/Application Support/Transmission with the old one. Then re-open Transmission and everything should be back to normal.

Luuuuurvly.