os x – Page 4 – Kev's Development Toolbox

July 11, 2012

2007-2008 Macs will be oldest models supported by OS X Mountain Lion

For the next upcoming Mac OS X release, Mountain Lion, the oldest models supported (depending on type) will be those released around 2007-2008.

I have an Early 2008 MacBook Pro which I use as my daily machine, and it’s still going strong. I’ve maxed out the memory and replaced the HDD but other than that I don’t have any immediate plans to replace it. Looks like I just squeezed in under the wire though to get Mountain Lion support, so an upgrade maybe on the cards sometime in the next couple of years.

April 27, 2012

Oracle release first Java development kit for Mac OS X

Up until now, official Java releases for the Mac only came from Apple. This week Oracle released their first version of Java 7 SE update 4 for Mac OS X. Grab it from here. Instructions for the install are here.

April 27, 2012

Setting JAVA_HOME on Mac OS X

Some time ago I had set JAVA_HOME in my .profile on Mac OS X to the following:

JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home; export JAVA_HOME

To some extent this works, but it doesn’t apparently pick up your preferred JDK version that you can set via the Java Preferences app in /Applications/Utilities (you set your preferred version by dragging your choice to the top of the list).

To set JAVA_HOME to be set to your preferred version, use this instead:

JAVA_HOME=`/usr/libexec/java_home`; export JAVA_HOME

This post here talks about the first approach, but there’s a comment in response to the post that points out the second point.

April 6, 2012

TrueCrypt with NTFS volumes on Mac OS X Lion

At some point I created a backup file on Windows 7 in a TrueCrypt volume container that was formatted with NTFS. I’m not sure why I originally formatted it with NTFS, but I think it was something to do with long filenames or a very deep directory nesting. Whatever. The point is, after upgrading to Lion, TrueCrypt would no longer mount this volume.

I did this several months ago, so I can’t remember what I originally did to get this setup, but apparently there’s something called MacFuse that adds support for additional filesystems, like NTFS on Mac. The version that I originally installed no longer works on Lion, so you need a different version that does – there’s a post here with a link to a version that works.

To get it working again, I uninstalled MacFuse and TrueCrypt, installed the version of MacFuse from above, reinstalled TrueCrypt, and not everything works.