Getting MacPorts to work Snow Leopard

Impatient? Skip to the process and go right to the solution.

I’m writing this using my shiny new OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard installation. So far it’s pretty good. I haven’t tried any heavy lifting so I don’t know if it’s really that much faster.

This is the first in a series of posts on how to get things working in Snow Leopard that got eaten during the installation. First up: MacPorts.

I ran into some issues with MySQL, (more on that later), and since my MySQL install is a MacPort I thought I would do an update to make sure things were working properly. However, this is what happened when I typed sudo port list installed:

dlopen(/opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/pextlib1.0/Pextlib.dylib, 10): no suitable image found. Did find:
/opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/pextlib1.0/Pextlib.dylib: no matching architecture in universal wrapper
while executing
"load /opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/pextlib1.0/Pextlib.dylib"
("package ifneeded Pextlib 1.0" script)
invoked from within
"package require Pextlib 1.0"
(file "/opt/local/bin/port" line 40)

So, I tried sudo port selfupdate and ran into the same problem. Whatever port command I tried I got the same response, clearly I needed to take some sort of action. After a quick look at the MacPorts website I figured I should update my Xcode Tools to the Snow Leopard version, so I did that, (there’s an installer in the Optional Installs folder on the Snow Leopard disk) and tried sudo port list installed again, and got the same response as before.

Some quick Googling & reading resulted in no quick answer, so I figured that since I don’t really have anything irreplaceable in my MySQL databases I would download the Snow Leopard DMG from the MacPorts download page, install, and see what happened. That’s the solution! Just download the Snow Leopard DMG and re-install. All of your ports will still be there, and mine seem to be working so far.

Hotmail vs. FF3 – Clueless Support!

Since I wrote that Hotmail is not friends with Firefox 3 on Wednesday there have been a lot of people finding that entry searching for things like “hotmail not work firefox 3” and “hotmail tells me to clear cache and cookies.”

Well, one reader, Joel, contacted support, and here’s the excellent E-mail he got back:

…Your message was forwarded to us at Windows Live Hotmail Technical Support. This is Kris and I gather that you are having issue that Windows Live Hotmail will not load in the full version when you are accessing your #######@###### account through Firefox 3 as your browser. I understand the importance of having this addressed immediately.

Joel, I would like to inform you that Windows Live Hotmail does not currently have the feature that will allowed you to use the full version of Windows Live Hotmail when using Firefox 3 as your browser. What I can do for you now is to personally submit this item to the Windows Live Hotmail Product Development Team as a feature request for evaluation, as I see the usefulness of this capability.

We appreciate your continued support as we strive to provide you with the highest quality service available. Thank you for using Windows Live Hotmail.

How cryptic can the response be?  Again:

Windows Live Hotmail does not currently have the feature that will allowed you to use the full version of Windows Live Hotmail when using Firefox 3 as your browser.

What’s going on?

Hotmail is not friends with Firefox 3

Since yesterday’s release of Firefox 3 I have been enjoying snappier speeds browsing  some of my favourite websites.  Not Windows Live Mail though.  When I log in it tells me this:

You are temporarily on the classic version of Windows Live Hotmail due to an error encountered during login. Before trying again, please clear your cache and cookies.

Reminds me of earlier times, when Windows Live Mail didn’t fully support FF.  What gives?

Update: A lot of people are finding this post when searching for things like “firefox 3 hotmail not working,” so it seems that this is a fairly common problem.  If anyone finds a solution, drop me a line at john at johnbeales dot com and let me know how it works, or post it in the comments, (comments are moderated so it may not appear right away).