Installing Apple Packages Remotely

I have a Mac that I maintain remotely and I have been using the command line software update to install the standard Mac updates.

# softwareupdate --list

# softwareupdate --install --all

I didn't know I could do the same thing for packages until this morning when the 10.7.4 update broke one of my macs in a weird way. I could do many things as long I didn't touch the menu bar or some dialog boxes. If I did, the program seemed to hang in using the shader compiler to send stuff to the ATI chip.

I downloaded the 10.7.4 Combo Update from Apple, but I could not launch the Installer.

This article gave me the info I needed. 

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20030614230204397

I found out I can run package updates from the command line.

sudo installer -pkg MacOSXUpdCombo10.7.4.pkg

 

Get a List of Installed Packages in Debian

Note to self:

To save:
$ dpkg --get-selections > installedPackagesDate.txt

To recover:
# dpkg --set-selections < installedPackagesDate.txt && apt-get dselect-upgrade

Know Your Mac

Here's a list of known process names for Mac applications that I think is formatted in a helpful way:

http://triviaware.com/macprocess/all

 

StreamFree.TV

A site that ranks some of the Roku channels and channels that are not in the Channel Store:

http://streamfree.tv/

Between the Roku, iTunes and Podcasts, I am overloaded on things I really want to watch, but don't have time.

MarsEdit - New Favorite Blog Tool

 

MarsEdit works well for what I want to do with it.

http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/

My old favorite Blogo, appears to now be a dead product. It doesn't work with Mac OS X Lion, and there doesn't seem to be any activity to fix it.

I also give MarsEdit extra points for being available in the Mac App store.

 

Manually Deleting Mac Applications

 

My quick list of things to look for when deleting Mac applications manually. Most mac applications seem well behaved and only populate things in /Applications and maybe a couple things in ~/Library. Other applications seems to try to put things in all sort of directories and even their own uninstaller doesn't clean up after them. Today's problem child is Mark/Space's Missing Sync. I ran the uninstaller, but it left behind a lot of stuff. So this is just my list of places to go look to uninstall the remaining pieces of applications.

• First look to see if they have an uninstaller in /Applications
• Re-download the package and see if the package comes with an uninstaller.
• Applications, look for Applications and Folders named for what you want to uninstall.
• Run AppZapper if there is no uninstaller
• /Library/Application Support
• /Library/Frameworks
• /Library/Preferences
• /Library/LaunchAgents
• /Library/LaunchDaemons
• /System/Library/Extensions
• ~/Library/Application Support
• ~/Library/Preferences