UPDATED: Since this writing, I’ve switched from Mike Bombich’s NetRestore, to DeployStudio. DeployStudio offers the ability to populate all 4 computer info fields after restoring an image, as part of an imaging workflow. I highly recommend DeployStudio for system imaging. Occasionally, I still use the method outlined below to tweak these fields. Part of my […]
How To: Run Lego Education’s WeDo software on OS X 10.4.11
I realize the topic of this post may be a bit specialized, but I would surely have liked to had something like this as a guide when I recently had to overcome this challenge.
Most of our entire campus is still running OS X 10.4.11, for the sole reason that login times for a .local Active Directory domain STILL take 2-3 minutes (as of 10.5.6). Our Lower School purchased some Lego robotics kits which came with new software called WeDo. The minimum requirements are OS X 10.5, and the installer will not run on OS X 10.4.
To get around this, I did the following: (more…)
Another Way to Kill Dashboard at Login for Managed Users
I love Dashboard, I have several widgets I can’t live without. Most of my users however, don’t even know what it is. I also love the Mighty Mouse but again, most of my users don’t understand how it works.
I’ve tried managing the mouse preferences to prevent Dashboard from opening when users click the scroll ball, but I can’t seem to get it to work for the life of me. The same applies to disabling the Dashboard application and all accompanying applications through Workgroup Manager.
I came across DashOff, an application for enabling and disabling Dashboard, but it requires user interaction and I want this to be automated. I finally gave up and decided to create an Applescript application called KillDash to run at login, to issue a “defaults write” command to disable dashboard.
How To: Manage a Shared USB Printer in Workgroup Manager
UPDATED: To the best of my knowledge, this method does not work on OS X 10.5 Leopard, or OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, due to changes in the way the printing system works in those versions of the Operating System.
While configuring our Middle and Upper School art rooms at work, I ran into an issue that was potentially going to cause a massive headache. How to use Workgroup Manager (WGM) to manage a local, shared USB printer?
Managing networked printers is easy with WGM, it even lets you decide if users have the ability to connect their own local USB printer. It does not, however, allow you to share this local printer and manage it.
What’s an admin to do? The first thing I did was start digging around for property list files, and that’s exactly where I found my answer.