I recently purchased a Macbook Pro 15″ (aluminum unibody version) and I love it. Since I do most of my web development under Windows (at least for now, this may change!), one of the first things I did was install Windows on a Bootcamp partition. I did this before upgrading the installed OS X operating system from Leopard (10.5) to Snow Leopard (10.6). This installed version 2.1 of the Bootcamp drivers for Windows. These drivers allow the Apple hardware to work under Windows, including the sound card, video, multi-touch trackpad (like enabling two-finger scrolling, right click, etc.) and more.

Most of the drivers worked very well but there was one very annoying thing — it seemed the sensitivity of the multi-touch trackpad was dialed up to eleven. I had enabled the dragging feature, which is designed to let you double-tap-and-hold in order to drag and drop, like to move an application window, or move an icon or drag/drop text while editing; The problem was I kept accidentally dragging stuff around my screen when all I wanted to do was move the mouse. Desktop icons kept getting lassoed or moved around on my screen; words were selected and moved around in documents that I was editing; background windows were getting activated and brought to the foreground while I was typing; it was really quite frustrating.

Every now and then, I’d look for updated drivers or look to see if I had missed a setting somewhere that could tune the trackpad sensitivity but I never found anything that really helped.

After an especially frustrating evening, I decided to look again. Googling revealed several references to the Bootcamp 3.0 drivers and it turns out they were supposed to come with Snow Leopard. I figured maybe I should insert my Snow Leopard DVD while booted into my Windows partition to see if there was something there mentioning an upgrade path. Sure enough, after inserted the DVD, the Bootcamp installer auto-started and prompted me to upgrade. After a few minutes, the installer asked to reboot the system.

The drivers are now updated to Bootcamp 3.0 and now my trackpad drivers are working much, much better. If only I had thought about this weeks ago! Not nearly as many accidental drag operations or stray clicks. Woohoo!

The only problem is that there is still no two-finger horizontal scrolling, only vertical scrolling. Hey, Apple, when can we get two-finger horizontal scrolling in Windows? Or is that one of the secret features you guys are saving for OS X in order to get folks to migrate? ;-)

But thanks to an article on macosxhints.com I’ve found the fix: The simplest thing to do is enter two commands at a command/terminal prompt. The more in depth fix is to install the developer tools and edit the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AppleShareClient.plist file. The terminal commands are pretty painless:

That’s all you have to do. Now you can connect without a hitch again, so back to work!

After some frustrating searches (no, there is no lookupd command in Leopard) I finally found the answer thanks to ITToolbox.

The command is

It looks like the dscacheutil is going to be a handy utility for web developing. Woohoo!

Update: Another useful thing is how to restart remote desktop from a command line:

Remember that, too.

Update II (2008-06-14 12:42 p.m.): Another useful thing is how to restart MySQL (or other startup programs) from a command line:

Update III (2011-09-14 19:27:57): Another useful thing is now to compute directory usage from the command line. The syntax is a little different for OS X than other *nix-based languages. To display the usage of all subdirectories below the current directory (“-d 1″ means depth of one):

Error -35: One or more required items cannot be found

then I have some good news and some bad news for you.

First, the bad news: It appears that some of Apple’s updates have broken AFP and SSH. This is due to some problems with the updated Kerberos (encrypting) code used by both network protocols. There may be a way to roll back the update using a combination of a downloaded update and a package extractor like Pacifist. Good luck with that.

But now for the good news: If you are the network administrator of the Windows server (or know the administrator) there is a change in the file sharing settings that will enable you to connect again with a Mac.

First, right click on “My Computer” and select “Manage”. On the left side, right click on “Shared Folders” and select the option “Configure File Server for Macintosh” (see image below).

On the next dialog box, change the authentication method to include “Apple Clear Text or Microsoft” (see image below).

Now your OS X clients should be able to connect without the error anymore!

After living with this for a few days I decided to search for an answer. I couldn’t find anything, either through Google or the Apple discussion boards, that related to my problem. I decided to hunt for an answer on my own and started digging through the various configuration and cache files to find the key. After trashing several preference files to no avail, I finally went to /Users/HomeDirectory/Library/Caches/ and deleted the following two files:

com.apple.preferencepanes.cache
com.apple.preferencepanes.searcindexcache

Voilà, my system prefs panel is back to normal!

Here are the before and after images of the system prefs panel: