Using OroborOSX with OS X 10.3


XDarwin will not work straight away with OS X 10.3. This is because it requires some keymapping files which are not present (for some reason?) under OS X 10.3.

These reside in the /System/Library/Keyboards directory under previous versions of OS X, so the easiest way around this problem is simply to copy the whole Keyboards folder from an OS X 10.2 or 10.1 system into the Library folder (in the top level System folder) on your machine running 10.3. (If you have already installed 10.3, and no longer have this Keyboards folder, let me know, and I can provide you with an archive of it.)

If you want to do it through command-line (which is probably the surest way to get through some of the security issues you may encounter in trying to access privileged folders), here are the commands you need...

On your machine with OS X 10.2/10.1:

cd /System/Library
tar zcvf ~/keyboards.tgz Keyboards

Then copy the "keyboards.tgz" file from your home folder on the 10.2/10.1 machine onto the home folder in the 10.3 machine. Then on the 10.3 machine:

cd /System/Library
sudo tar zxvf ~/keyboards.tgz

That should allow you to launch OroborOSX on OS X 10.3.

Apart from the keymapping issue, OroborOSX should work fine - but only the latest v0.9 preview will work with multiple users simultaneously.

Also, v0.8.5 onwards should get along ok with the new Expose mechanism - though you must be careful to ensure that you are not in the middle of dragging an X11 window when you activate Expose, since this can cause the location of the actual window to get out-of-sync with the position that the X Server thinks the window has.






If you need more help with any of the above issues, you can contact me by e-mail: adrian@ic.ac.uk