[X Newbies] help! cd, net and help viewer gone south

[Alex]

On Saturday, Apr 3, 2004, at 09:38 Canada/Eastern, Michel Eytan wrote:

> [...] I admit being reticent to create
> additional users, if only for security reasons and for not knowing 
> (damn
> OSX!) what residue remains in the box if (and when) I delete the newly
> created user.

Randy's instructions (to which I referred you) include directions on 
deleting the new user stuff. As to not knowing what remains after you 
create a new user... well, you can read up on it in a good Unix manual, 
or take heart from the fact that, once you delete the new user account, 
whatever is left has no bearing whatever on your security.

> I could also of course simply reinstall the System. However I have been
> forced to do this in the recent past and I then got an Previous System 
> folder
> that contained stuff (probably corresponding to items I had installed 
> myself)
> that did not exist in the new System -- so that I had to move the 
> items by
> hand to the new System folder, correcting permissions etc. etc. [...]

Re-installing the OS with the maintain user settings is one of the most 
useful features of OS X. In fact, IMHO in quite a few cases you can get 
back to work much faster by doing this than by spending hours trying to 
troubleshoot some obscure problem. However, it does require some 
forethought.

What you describe is actually a feature, and it's perfectly sensible, 
once you think about it. Why re-install? Because you've run into a 
system-wide problem you can't otherwise fix. There's at least a chance 
the problem is caused by the extra stuff you installed; should the 
re-install preserve such items, it would defeat its own purpose.

The solution is to be very methodical. Keep a list of everything you 
install system-wide (e.g., updates, printer drivers, keylayouts, Java 
servers, and so on) and burn all the installers to a CD. If the need 
arises to re-install, afterwards just pop in the CD and run the 
installers/copy the stuff according to the list order. If you keep the 
list up to date, it'll take much of the pain of the apres-reinstall 
away.

f