A server operating system that costs just £35 and is easy to configure,  must have a catch.

We have run across a few people who have upgraded their Macs to Lion and are having trouble emptying the trash! It gets stuck and the progress bar never finishes. If you’re having a similar problem with your Mac, then try out a few of the methods below to fix the issue.

One very cool new feature in OS X Lion is AirDrop. It's a way to leverage your home or office Wi-Fi network to send files to others who are also running Lion by just dragging and dropping those files onto an icon representing the other person. In this short post, I'll show you how AirDrop works and point out a few gotchas.

Apple this week released three firmware updates that include fixes to compatibility with the forthcoming Apple Thunderbolt Display, but the MacBook Pro firmware update released today brings another interesting addition to the company's current models: Lion Recovery over the Internet.

This update enables Lion Recovery from an Internet connection and includes fixes that resolve issues with Apple Thunderbolt Display compatibility and Thunderbolt Target Disk Mode performance on MacBook Pro (early 2011) models.

Show all files in the Finder

If you work with Unix files and folders a lot, you’ve probably already noticed that you can’t see many of them in the Finder—the /usr, /bin, and /etc folders, amongst many others, don’t show up in the Finder.

If you want to, for instance, use a GUI editor such as Smultron or BBEdit to open a Unix file, you can’t do it via a double-click (or drag and drop) in the Finder, because those Unix files will be hidden from view. Although most editors, including BBEdit and Smultron, include an “Open Hidden” menu item for reaching these files, sometimes it’s more convenient to browse and open them from the Finder.

Using a simple Terminal command, you can work with all the files on your machine from the Finder. Open Terminal, type this command, and press Enter:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

To make the command take effect, you need to restart the Finder. One way to do this is to hold down the Option key, then click and hold on the Finder icon in the Dock. When the contextual menu appears, select Relaunch and the Finder will restart.

When it does, you’ll find that you can now see every single file and folder on your Mac:



Notice that the /tmp, /usr, and /var directories now show up in the Finder. You’ll also discover that you can see your Unix “dot files,” such as .bashrc, in the Finder.

So what are the downsides of this trick? Well, you’ll see every hidden file on your system, which means that you’ll see a .DS_Store file in every directory. And by having every file visible, it’s that much easier to make a dumb mistake and accidentally delete one (though the truly important files are system-owned, making it much harder to do something stupid to them). Finally, as you can see in the above screenshot, all of your folder icons (in 10.4, at least) will be dimmed. However, if you work with Unix files a lot, you may find these tradeoffs worth it for the increased ease of use.

If you tire of the dimmed folders and other downsides, just open Terminal and repeat the command, but change YES to NO, then press Return again. You’ll need to relaunch the Finder again, but when you do, everything will be back to normal.

Cure for a forgetful Mac

Lately, when I search in Mail for messages from a particular sender, only older matching messages appear. When I scan down the list of recent messages I’ve received I see other messages from that sender that didn’t appear in the search results. What’s wrong?

This is a sign that Spotlight has lost its way. When this happens you should reindex your hard drive. The easiest way to do this is to launch System Preferences and select the Spotlight preference. Click on the Privacy tab and then drag your hard drive’s icon into the location area. Confirm that you want to do this by clicking OK in the resulting dialog box. Now select the hard drive you just added and click the Minus (–) button at the bottom of the location list to remove it. Spotlight will then reindex the drive.
What’s happened is you’ve essentially told Spotlight, “Please forget about anything you’ve indexed on this drive.” Spotlight complies by clearing out the index for that drive. When you then remove the drive from the location list, Spotlight notes that the drive has no index and proceeds to create one.

Apple today released OS X 10.7.1, the first maintenance update to OS X Lion. The update is available via Software Update and Apple's download pages.

The 10.7.1 update is recommended for all users running OS X Lion and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability and compatibility of your Mac, including fixes that:

- Address an issue that may cause the system to become unresponsive when playing a video in Safari.
- Resolve an issue that may cause system audio to stop working when using HDMI or optical audio out.
- Improve the reliability of Wi-Fi connections.
- Resolve an issue that prevents transfer of your data, settings, and compatible applications to a new Mac running OS X Lion.

For detailed information on this update, please visit this website:http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4764.