osx

I have been testing the Drupal support module locally which features the ability to create tickets from email messages to an IMAP inbox. It requires the imap_open() PHP function provided by the imap PHP extension, which unfortunately is not included in the OS X builds of PHP.

ivucica has published a wonderful script to his blog that compiles the IMAP extension without having to recompile PHP entirely, but unfortunately it was not working for me and nobody else seemed to have my problem either. Compiling the imap library and PCRE went very smoothly, but when it came time to build the PHP extension this error appeared during ./configure:

Well, crap. I check config.log and determine it's a linking failure:

I couldn't figure out why it wasn't picking up the symbols from libssl, even when manually trying to compile said file and adding a -lssl flag.

After an hour of struggling with it and my debugging efforts going nowhere, I try adding -lcrypto for the hell of it and it works!

tl;dr, if you get this error then simply replace the following line of the aformentioned script:

With the following line that adds the required linker flags:

That's it!

GIMP is a great program, but I always found it was a bit annoying to use on OS X (Leopard). First of all, whenever X11 starts, a new xterm window along with it. Besides that, when switching windows you need two clicks before GIMP (or any other program, really) registers the click and actually does something - the first click just switches the active window. Seeing as GIMP has it's tool palette in a separate window, this quickly became extremely irritating.

After a quick google, I found many sources saying that to disable xterm, I needed to copy /private/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc to ~/.xinitrc and edit out the "xterm &" line inside. That's easy enough, but the only problem is that on Leopard with the latest X11 from XQuartz (2.3.2.1 at the time of writing) installed, /private/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc doesn't exist! Although /usr/X11/lib/X11/xinit/xinitrc does, editing out all references to xterm doesn't work anyways. Instead, the app_to_run preference needs to be modified:

defaults write org.x.X11 app_to_run /usr/bin/true

/usr/bin/true is a command that does nothing (literally), so this essentially tells X11 to autostart nothing. I moved onto my next problem and found that to solve the two-clicks problem, the solution was to enable the "focus follows mouse" option like this:

defaults write org.x.x11 FocusFollowsMouse -string YES

I've been using that for a few months and I find it's still pretty annoying, but it's still less annoying than having to click twice on everything. Fortunately, I recently discovered the "wm_click_through" preference which is exactly what I had been looking for all along:

Now X11's window focus is back to normal, and clicking on inactive windows works as expected; it switches the window and activates the widget you clicked on. Problems solved!