Finding Emacs - Aquamacs and Emacs on OSX

v0.2

12 Oct 11

I have both Aquamacs and Emacs on my Mac laptop.  Aquamacs is a really good adaptation of Emacs to the OSX environment, particularly for "non-geeks".

One aspect of Aquamacs has had me wondering about it over the last few weeks - that of initialisation.  If you read the aquamacs manual, it tells that it reads its own customisation and preferences files first and then it reads " .emacs ".

Experimentation tells me that Aquamacs does NOT read the initialisation files contained in " .emacs.d " as per the latest emacs variants.  The only problem with this is if you do not know about it.  Simply overcome - have your " preferences.el " and your " init.el " files load the things you want them to load.

Done!


later.

Snow Leopard and NTFS

This episode came out of me recovering data from my Daughter's Linux installation.  I'd been thinking of getting her an iMac for Christmas, and damn if her Lenny machine didn't agree.  First, it wouldn't boot, and then there were multiple disk errors .... mayday!

Because of the limitations of the failing file system, I copied the data onto an ext2 formatted disk.  I copied the data onto a storage drive on another system and then set about finding how I could transfer the data to a Snow Leopard Mac.

To cut a long story short, I found that an external ntfs drive had to be formatted from a Microsoft system to be recognised by the Mac.  Linux has a number of ntfs tools (easily installed in Debian) that enable an ntfs drive to be writeable by Linux.

From there, it is easy ..... write the data to the external drive and then copy it to the Mac.  Snow Leopard has native ntfs READ capability.  (It has native write capability, but this is hidden).

Some places to look ....

http://www.ntfsmounter.com/
http://www.tuxera.com/community/release-history/
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=785376
http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

Update 29Dec 2010

I downloaded the ntfs-3g driver from here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/catacombae/files/NTFS-3G%20for%20Mac%20OS%20X

Installed fine.

:)