The easiest way to install rTorrent is by using Fink or MacPorts. (Both of these tools allow you to download software that has been ported from Unix/Linux to Mac OS X.) I’ll use Fink since I’m a fan of Debian Linux and Fink uses the Debian dpkg and apt-get package management tools.

Apparently there is no Fink binary available yet for OS X Leopard (10.5), so it must be compiled from source. These directions (which also contain instructions for setting up rTorrent on earlier versions of OS X) helped explain the overall process presented here. Since you’ll need to compile from source, you will need to have Xcode installed (a set of development tools from Apple).

The basic steps for setting up Fink are as follows:

1. Download the latest Fink source
2. Open up a terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app) and run the following commands
3. $ cd /path/to/download/directory
4. $ tar xvzf fink-x.xx.x.tar.gz
5. $ cd fink-x.xx.x
6. $ ./bootstrap
7. You will now be presented with several questions. Answer using the defaults (press Enter) for everything except the question about whether you want to enable the unstable tree; you must answer Yes to this question (see here if you accidentally missed this step).
8. When the script finishes, run /sw/bin/pathsetup.sh
9. For good measure, run apt-get update

Great! Now that Fink is installed, installing rTorrent is really easy:

$ fink install rtorrent

You might be notified that a bunch of extra packages need to be installed (there were 46 needed on my system!) so just choose Yes. After the packages have been downloaded and compiled (this might take a while) rTorrent should be on your system and ready to use.

Getting Started with rTorrent

You can launch rTorrent by simply running rtorrent in a Terminal, but before you get started you should look over the man page (man rtorrent) and then set up a configuration file (~/.rtorrent.rc). There are only four lines in my configuration file (check the man page to see what these do):

port_range = 26000-26999
directory = ~/downloads/torrents/
session = ~/downloads/torrents/sessions/
encryption = allow_incoming,try_outgoing,enable_retry

If you’re interested in a lot more options, you might want to grab a copy of the sample .rtorrent.rc config file (why this wasn’t included in the package, I don’t know) and place it in your home directory.

The rTorrent User Guide has information about all the stuff on the screen as well as various commands to navigate the interface.

Using the wonderful screen utility, rTorrent becomes even more powerful on remote systems. I leave rTorrent running on my server and whenever I remotely SSH into the box I can then reattach the screen session that rTorrent is running inside of and instantly have access to it!

The feature, known as Quick Look, is one of the more than 300 new features in OS X Leopard (10.5). Quick Look also works on text files, documents, PDF files, and even HTML and PowerPoint. This method of previewing files is so much easier than opening them in their native application! (It’s more than a preview though, since you can also scroll through the pages for multi-page documents.) Closing the preview window is as easy as pressing Esc, or you can simply select another file with the preview open and it will preview the newly selected file.

So every other day for the past two weeks I have been prompted to update the Google Talk plugin, and every single time I choose OK this same error message pops up. I had planned to leave the software update installed, but since it’s not working and it’s really starting to bug me, I’m removing it.

According to some discussion on Google Groups, the Google Software Update can only be removed by uninstalling any plugins associated with it (Google Earth, Google Talk, etc). Well that’s not fair. I never installed any plugins to begin with! Time to do it the hacky way.

Hidden away on a page labeled “What is Google Software Update?“, Google provides the single command you need to run to uninstall Google Software Update from your entire system:

sudo /Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent.app/Contents/Resources/install.py --uninstall

NOTE: Make sure the --uninstall portion of the command actually has two dash characters. It’s possible your browser replaced the two dashes with a single dash character.

If you have something like the Google Gears plugin installed in your browser, you should either uninstall the Gears plugin or use it with caution. The Google Software Update is meant to help keep your Gears plugin (and other plugins) updated with any new security patches. Of course, if the Software Update isn’t working, then it’s really nothing more than an annoying nag screen.

Removing the Update Engine from your Home Directory

Several commenters mentioned the update engine was installed in their home directory. If the update engine was installed on a per-user basis (as opposed to system-wide), then use this command instead:

~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent.app/Contents/Resources/install.py --uninstall

NOTE: Make sure the --uninstall portion of the command actually has two dash characters. It’s possible your browser replaced the two dashes with a single dash character.

Preventing Google Earth from Reinstalling the Update Engine

A commenter provided this solution for preventing Google Earth from reinstalling the update engine:

Google Earth reinstalls the software updater when it’s launched. To prevent this I created an empty file at ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate, then transferred ownership to root and made it read-only for normal users:

touch ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate
sudo chown root ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate
sudo chmod 644 ~/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate

Update: As one commenter mentioned, Google now has a page relevant to this discussion.

Update: It appears that at least some of Google’s software now gives you the option for disabling the installation of the automatic update engine during the setup process. See this blog post for an explanation.

It appears that now you can plug this into your terminal to disable Google Software Updater from checking for updates:

defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval 0

Google Update Uninstaller Tool

Viktor Petersson from Wireload notified me of a tool they put together to make uninstalling the Google Update engine really simple. If you don’t feel comfortable with the command line, download the Google Update Uninstaller.

Simply open the terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app) and run the following command:

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

You’ll then need to restart Finder by either rebooting or running the killall Finder command. Now Finder will show the full path in the title!

If for some reason you want to revert back to seeing only the folder name (I can’t imagine why you would), simply repeat the process and change YES to NO at the end of the command.

I frequently post screenshots on this blog and I hated that the window screenshots included the drop shadow added by OS X around the window. This meant the width of the resulting screenshot was actually 50px bigger all the way around.

Luckily, there is a way to disable the drop shadow when taking screenshots. Simply open the terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app) and run the following command:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

Now logout (or reboot) and when you login again your screenshots won’t include the drop shadow! For more helpful shortcuts and commands for screenshots in OS X, check out Taking Screenshots in Mac OS X.

First of all, I had never seen this update window in my life and I never approved the installation of any such Software Update Engine! Secondly, what Google Talk Plugin is it talking about? As far as I can remember, I never installed a GTalk plugin. I use Adium for chatting on GTalk and I never had to install a plugin to use Google Talk! Maybe the update engine is trying to update the GTalk plugin that came with Adium?

There are some other people who are also quite annoyed by this secret update engine installation. Apparently the update engine is fully open-source, but there is no uninstall program. To uninstall it, you must unregister applications that are using it and wait a day for it to automatically uninstall itself. How ugly.

Simply visit their site and download QuickTime Components binary package. After opening the .dmg file (Windows users should be able to just download and run the .exe file), copy XiphQT.component to ~/Library/Components (user-only) or to /Library/Components (system-wide). Update: Randy Cox noted in the comments that on Snow Leopard the path to copy the file is actually /Library/Quicktime/

If iTunes is open, restart it and wallah! You’ve got .ogg support in iTunes!

erin:/# mount -t hfsplus /dev/sda /osx-backup
[ 630.769804] hfs: write access to a journaled filesystem is not supported, use the force option at your own risk, mounting read-only.

This warning puzzled me because I was able to mount fine before the reinstall and, since the external drive is to be used as the bootable backup for my MBP, anything with “at your own risk” was unacceptable.

I had already erased my previous Linux installation so I had no way of checking what might have previously given me write access to the HFS+ drive. A quick apt-cache search hfs revealed a bunch of packages related to the HFS filesystem. I installed the two that looked relevant to what I was trying to do:

hfsplus - Tools to access HFS+ formatted volumes
hfsutils - Tools for reading and writing Macintosh volumes

No dice. I still couldn’t get write access without that warning. I tried loading the hfsplus module and then adding it to /etc/modules to see if that would make a difference. As I expected, it didn’t. I was almost ready to give up but there was another HFS package in the list that, even though it seemed unrelated to what was trying to do, seemed worth a shot:

hfsprogs - mkfs and fsck for HFS and HFS+ file systems

It worked! I have no idea how or why (and I’m not interested enough to figure it out), but after installing the hfsprogs package I was able to mount my HFS+ partition with write access.

Update:

As Massimiliano and Matthias have confirmed in the comments below, the following solution seems to work with Ubuntu 8.04:

From Linux, after installing the tools suggested before, you must run:
mount -o force /dev/sdx /mnt/blabla

Otherwise, in my fstab, I have an entry like this:
UUID=489276e8-7f9b-3ae6-8c73-69b99ccaab9c /media/Leopard hfsplus defaults,force 0 0