Basic Mac OS 10 System Administration

Basic Mac OS 10 System Administration

Last Revision: 1/9/03

There are two primary locations for making changes to a Mac OS 10 system. The first is the Utilities folder, which includes printer setup, system diagnostics, and other useful system tools. The second is the System Preferences application, which is the MacOS equivalent of the Windows Control Panel.

The Utilities Folder

In a normal MacOS 10 installation, the utilities folder is located at the following path:

/Applications/Utilities

If the user has moved the folder, you may have to search for it (Use the Command-F shortcut to open the find-file utility)

Once you have accessed the folder, there are a number of utilities that are helpful for day-to-day maintenance and setup.

• Apple System Profiler: This utility displays detailed information about every aspect of the system including processor speed, RAM layout, Network information, System Version, PCI, USB, and Firewire detected device listings, installed applications and certain system logs. When trying to get information about a specific machine, this is the place to look.

• Disk Utility: This is MacOS 10's disk formatting, partitioning, and lightweight filesystem repair utility. If you're having strange I/O Errors, it never hurts to run the Verify Disk routine under this utility's First Aid tab.

• Print Center: This is what you use to add, remove, and manage all printers under Mac OS 10. For instructions on setting up a printer, see the supplementary instructions available at the UMR Helpdesk's website,

• Terminal: Anyone who has some UNIX knowledge will quickly find that this utility can be extremely helpful. As MacOS 10 is in fact a UNIX workstation at its core, you can do almost anything with this utility that you could in a normal UNIX terminal session. Telnetting, Traceroutes, Pings, Direct Process Management, and file manipulation can be initiated from this utility. It is especially helpful if some part of the GUI has frozen, allowing you to go behind the scenes and fix the problem.

There are several other utilities in this folder (which you may explore as you like) but the ones highlighted here are the ones you will probably use most often.

System Preferences

The System Preferences application is the rough equivalent of the Windows Control Panel. With it you can change sound, network settings, display settings, user information, date/time, and pretty much everything else you'll find in the Windows Control Panel. To open a category, simply click on an icon. The window will reform itself to display the options associated with the category you chose. To go back and see the rest of the controls, click Show All in the top left corner of the window.

The System Preferences application can be found in the Dock by default, and is located at this path:

/Applications/System Preferences

As with the Utilities folder, the user may have moved it to a different location. Again, simply press Command-F to bring up the find file utility and search for System Preferences.