This page summarizes basic usage and FAQ for the netboot Mac OS X environment on the cs network. It is relevant only for the lion version (the gray login screen) of the cs managed macs (not old or personal computers).
Besides this page, there's also a user managed mac tips page with additional tips for mac usage.
There are two places: Applications and CS-Applications. Applications can be accessed through the Finder menu: Go -> Applications. CS-Application can be accessed through the Application directory, and by default it will be placed on the right side of the Dock.
If the installation is a simple drag-and-drop (not an installer), you should be able to copy it to the local disk. If there's an installer that requires administrative privileges, you can't install it. You can ask the system to install it globally, but depending on the nature of the application and the installer, it might not get installed.
There is a difference between the Snow Leopard (old) CS-Application and the new CS-Application. If you have old links, or aliases (shortcuts) to the old CS-Applications you should delete them and link to the new CS-Application, as not all the applications are compatible with lion.
Microsoft office doesn't work well in our environment, in some cases it will refuse to open or save files, and sometimes it will delete existing files while trying to save them. Currently it will probably only open/save files located in the home directory. Alternatives to Microsoft Word are:
There can be many reasons for that, which is why we highly recommend to use one of the alternatives (see previous question). One possibility is that the leading language is set to Hebrew which for some odd reason confuses the office setup. The solution is to change the default (first) language back to English (In System Preferences -> Language & Text -> Language), and logout and re-login for the changes to take effect.
We officially support Firefox. Safari is also installed and can be used. Any other browsers that don't require administrative privileges (e.g. Chrome, Opera) can be installed by the users (see above).
Firefox has some issues installing some extensions e.g. it will ask to restart but won't install them. If that happens, do the following:
Note that this method might not work on all extensions.
You might have played with your certificate configuration (through the Keychain Access program). Delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.security.revocation.plist and restart Safari.
The courses' accounts are not accessible from the macs. As such before su-ing to the course, one must login to a linux machine.
Sometimes previous configuration interfere with the current matlab. As such, the best solution is to delete all of matlab's previous configuration. Try deleting the following paths:
Before deleting them, make sure you don't have any special files/scripts that you wrote (specifically in ~/Documents/MATLAB).
You need to change CC from gcc-4.2 to llvm-gcc-4.2. This should be changed in the maci64 section of the mexopts.sh file.