[OS X TeX] Overfull

[Axel E. Retif]

On Tuesday, September 3, 2002, at 08:18  AM, Bruno Voisin wrote:

>> Dominique:
>>
>>>
>>> The second solution don't match (I have no su password : my seller, 
>>> who installed my computer, don't remember it and I'm afraid to use 
>>> blindly the CD installer !).
>>
>> You should not be afraid to use the CD to reset your password. It's 
>> really very easy (if you follow Apple's instructions), and sooner or 
>> later you will have to. (And I wonder --how did you install Mr. 
>> Wierda's teTeX distribution if you don't have administrative 
>> privileges?)
>
> NO IT'S NOT HARMLESS! There is one important bug, or feature, that you 
> must be aware of when you are working on a non-English keyboard: the 
> language setting (i.e. the localized keyboard mapping) may be different 
> when you are resetting the password from the Jaguar CD, and when you 
> are booting from your hard drive to start a session. This means the 
> password you defined using the CD is not what you actually type in the 
> startup screen; thus it is rejected.
>
> To avoid this, type in a password from an "international" part of the 
> keyboard, like the letters "ERTY" which use the same keys in English 
> and French, and probably in most European languages as well.

I didn't think of that, in part  because I don't use special characters 
for my passwords, but also because I'm accustomed to using three 
different physical keyboards (English, Spanish and Spanish ISO) and 
three different logical keyboards layouts (U.S., Spanish and Spanish 
ISO). Here, at home, I'm typing this on a physical Spanish ISO but using 
the U.S. keyboard layout --later I'll shift in order to answer my mail 
in Spanish--, and my Pismo PowerBook has a physical English keyboard.

When I do my LaTeX exercises (wish I were a TeXnician, like most of you 
are, but I'm not) and I type, for example, \begin{document} what I 
really see in my keyboard is Çbegin^document*; and when I type 
/sbin/fsck -y (see bellow) what I see in the keyboard is -sbin-fsck ?y.

At work (a publishing house), where I'm in charge of six Macs (three 
with OS X) and help with some others, the situation is no different. We 
use QuarkXPress --both Passport (very expensive) and English versions; 
with the English version you need a System in English and start Quark 
with the U.S. keyboard --later we can shift to a Spanish keyboard layout.

In short, you can get accustomed to different (logical) keyboards 
layouts. I've reseted the passwords (administrators, root and normal 
users) in the machines at work without a problem, just FOLLOW Apple's 
instructions.

Dominique, don't be afraid of OS X --if you can do (La)TeX, you can do 
OS X. But ALWAYS BACKUP your data: my desktop at home and my laptop 
backup each other every day --it just takes a few minutes this way. 
There are excellent books too --David Pogue's Mac OS X: The Missing 
Manual, and Ray & Ray's Mac OS X Unleashed, for example, as well as 
O'Reilly's (http://www.oreilly.com) free online courses on Terminal.app.

Sooner or later you might have to reinstall everything --and I mean 
everything-- because you mess it all up. It happened to me (twice) when 
I compiled directly Thomas Esser's teTeX; I only succeeded at my third 
attempt (so you can see how grateful I am to Gerben Wierda for his 
distribution). But with things like this I learn the hard way, which I 
think is the best way. The only really SCARY thing you can do with your 
keyboard is getting into Open Firmware.

>
> I was told this after spending about two hours on the phone with Apple 
> Technical Support. I had all sorts of problems after migrating to 10.2 
> (my original admin account is absent from the startup screen, and 
> invisible to all other accounts, even in the Accounts item of System 
> Prefs, some programs like Mozilla crash partly when started from this 
> account, etc.). At one point I tried to reset my password from the CD, 
> it only made things worse because of the problem above. Then Apple 
> Technical Support told me the trick above. And more, like pressing 
> Cmd-S during startup to boot in command-line mode, then running the 
> UNIX fsck. Don't try, it's scary!
>
> Bruno Voisin

Maybe you used the "Archive and Install" option, which has caused 
problems to  (quite) a few people. That is why I did a clean install.

Axel
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