The other day I was at school and I needed to install X11 on my Intel Mac in order to run an NX Client session into my Linux box at home.

However, Apple doesn’t seem to want to put the X11 User package for Tiger online anywhere… You can find the package for <=10.3, but what good is that!?

For anyone like me who doesn’t carry their Tiger install DVD at all times, I am going to put the X11 User and X11 SDK packages online.

You can download them here. - zip file ~60MB

The .zip file contains two packages: X11User.pkg and X11SDK.pkg. I think you need to install the X11SDK.pkg first; however, if you have the developer tools installed, it’s probably already there. After the install, run Software Update as Apple has released an update for this version of X11.

Enjoy X11.

Note: There has been some question as to whether or not I am allowed to host and distribute this binary copy of X11 from Apple. In looking at the XFree86 license, I believe I am freely able to redistribute this file as specified in this section: “Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:”

And this condition:

“Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution, and in the same place and form as other copyright, license, and disclaimer information.”

I hope I’m right. All I want to do is help people out here…

Update: Want to thank me? Leave a comment (many already have, and I love seeing that I have helped people)!

Some have suggested that I set up a way for people to leave small donations for my hosting of the files. Here’s my idea: why don’t you treat yourself and help me out at the same time! Below are a couple of links to the Amazon product pages for OSX Leopard. If you buy Leopard through one of these links, then I get a small amount of money through the Amazon Associates program. The cost to you is the same (actually less than buying Leopard from Apple), and you can help me save money to get myself a copy!

Even if you don’t want Leopard, use one of these links and then buy a book… I’ll still get ~10¢, Yay!

• OSX Leopard (Single User)
• OSX Leopard (5 User Family Pack)

So say you come across a video online that is so great you would really like to save a copy locally to watch over and over again (assuming you are allowed to). For sites such as YouTube and the other majors this might not be a problem… there are numerous tools available to grab content. However, some sites don’t work with the commonly available tools, or maybe you would just rather use tools that are already included in OSX, well here’s how.

Say you want to grab a wonderful video about “Happy Feet” from Reuters.com…

1. Using Safari navigate to the page that contains the video.

2. Open the “Activity” window from the Safari Window menu.

3. In the Activity window, find the page that contains the video, and click on the triangle to show all the elements loaded in the page.

4. Scan the list until you find a video file (in this case a .flv flash video file). It is easy to pick out the video files as they are generally much larger in size than everything else. Also note that a page might contain more than one video file (if the movie first loads with an advertisement etc.) you generally want to pick the biggest one.

   Edit (Dec 1, 2006) It seems that some sites (I’ve seen it at YouTube) actually load the video without the extension. In this case, just look for a large file (it’s called get_video on YouTube) and add the proper extension to the end (ie. for YouTube, .flv).

5. Double click on the url of the video file and a new Safari window will open. At this point, Safari might start downloading the video. If it does not and a bunch of random text starts displaying in the browser that’s ok, continue by selecting the url and copying it.

6. Open up a terminal (Terminal.app is located in the Utilities folder inside your Applications folder). In the terminal, type (leave out the “<>”):

   $ curl <paste> -o <where>/<what>
   

   Make sure that whatever you chose to name the video ends with the same extension as the original file, in this case .flv. Here’s what it would look like for the “Happy Feet” video:

   $ curl http://int1.fp.sandpiper.net/reuters/t_assets/20061127/a72e...f2943.flv -o ~/Desktop/HappyFeet.flv
   

   This would save the video to my desktop and name it HappyFeet.flv.

7. Press enter and you should see something like this as the video downloads:

8. When it’s done, you should have a copy of the video file on your local disk. You’ll need an application that can play flash video to watch .flv files, I recommend VLC or the Perian plugin for QuickTime.

• Enjoy!

I randomly found a site tonight that all Flickr lovers will enjoy, create your own personal Flickr badge.

“I’m a Professional!”

Many people may not realize that if you install Apple’s “public source” Darwin Streaming Server onto a Mac running a normal version of OSX (not server), it really seems to install the exact same QuickTime Streaming Server software that comes with OSX Server (minus some UI tools). Well, I found this out earlier this year when I installed DSS on my PowerBook to play with streaming content to a Nokia 6620.

I subsequently forgot that it was installed on my PowerBook until tonight when I wanted to run phpMyAdmin and I was getting errors because… QTSS has been running this whole time (oops).

Of course, I didn’t remember what my username or password was for the QTSS, and I found that it was quite a pain to hunt down how to change it (doesn’t seem to be in the docs from Apple), so I will post the method here for anyone else with this problem.

Open a terminal and enter:

sudo cat /Library/QuickTimeStreaming/Config/qtgroups

You will see something like:

admin: yourQTSSuser

Now to change the password, enter:

sudo qtpasswd yourQTSSuser

You may now go to http://localhost:1220 with your new password and carry on.