[X-Unix] External drive volume doesn't automount?

[William H. Magill]

On 10 May, 2005, at 02:58, Kevin Stevens wrote:
> On May 8, 2005, at 11:14, Kevin Stevens wrote:
>
>>> I haven't looked for at the issue under Tiger. Under Tiger, home  
>>> directories on external volumes, i.e. FireWire drives, simply  
>>> work. Implying that the default was again changed, but I have not  
>>> explored why it works. I installed Tiger on an clean internal  
>>> partition and then used the setup assistant to copy stuff over.  
>>> The process very nicely copied my old sym-links for the home  
>>> directories an everything was "just there" as expected.
>>
>> This partition doesn't contain user home directories.  The  
>> external partition with home directories is "OS X", and it does  
>> automount, though it is also a mirrored partition with the  
>> internal drive, which might cause that independently.  I'll report  
>> findings back.
>
> The macosxhints tip worked under Tiger, though for some reason I  
> had to create the file from scratch - using the "defaults" syntax  
> mentioned in the hint produced an odd binary file - didn't bother  
> to chase down the reason.  Thanks!

plist files in Tiger are now binary. (primarily for speed)

You can convert them back to text with a command line utility.

 From another list, just last week:

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Nicholas Riley <njriley at uiuc.edu>
> Date: 30 April, 2005 16:43:47 EDT
> To: macosx-admin at omnigroup.com
> Subject: Re: Plist Files in Tiger - Binary?
>
> On Sat, Apr 30, 2005 at 12:46:06PM -0700, EatingPie wrote:
>
>> Looks like the .plist files are binary in Tiger.  At least the
>> com.apple.* and .GlobalPreferences.plist files.
>>
>> Can anyone give an explanation as to *why* this has happened.
>
> An up to 3-5x improvement in performance; details of the binary plist
> format are mentioned in the release notes:
>
> <http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/CoreFoundation/ 
> CoreFoundation.html>
> <http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/Carbon/HIToolbox.html>
> <http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/Cocoa/Foundation.html>
>
>
>> And is there a UNIX command line utility for editing them?  Maybe  
>> something
>> like an emacs mode, or even a conversion program.
>
> plutil -convert <file> will do an in-place conversion.  (pl won't,
> which is rather irritating, as I'm used to doing "pl < file" to see a
> property list in a readable format.)
>
> -- 
> Nicholas Riley <njriley at uiuc.edu> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/ 
> njriley>
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T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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