Applied Solutions Group

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any damage you may cause to your system.  Make sure you understand how to copy your files before locking your self out of an account or inadvertently deleting a profile that you need

I had a situation where I had to move a home directory (in-tact) from one user to another.  Permissions became very inconsistent since the previous user never fully migrated his profile from his predecessor.  To clean up the mess I did the following (works on Snow Leopard/Lion):

Enabled Root User
Go to your System Preferences and under system click on Accounts

Then click on Login Options, and to the right you will see Network Account Server, click Join.

A window will pop-up, continue by clicking on Open Directory Utility …

This will open the Directory Utility, make sure the small lock on the bottom left is in the Unlocked position, if not, click on it and enter your admin password. Once it is unlocked, go to the top menu, click Edit > Enable Root User

Once you Enable Root User, you will be prompted to enter a password for the Root.

Backup up both profiles
Now that Root is enabled, log in under a separate Admin account – Make sure you are not logged in as one of the users you are moving.

Add the new user to your system. (System Preferences > Accounts > +)

Once you have added the new user to your system, open up Terminal and become root by typing “su – root” without the quotes.
Once you are done, make a copy of both the new user and the old user profile directory e.g. /Users/NewUser/ and /Users/OldUser. Compare the newly created backups with the old directories to make sure the structure is the same.

Move the profile to the new user
Now that you have compared the directories, you are ready to move everything over to the new user. Remove the original (not the newly created backup) /Users/NewUser.

Now move the old user to the new user e.g. mv /Users/OldUser /Users/NewUser

Recursively change permissions
I had a minor issue with syntax, but after a little trial and error I did the following:

From /Users/ I typed chown -R NewUser *

This changes the permissions(ownership) from OldUser to NewUser.

Log in and Test your new permissions
Log out of the current profile and log in under NewUser and test the permission by opening up any documents or desktop elements.

Good Luck

So you just upgraded to the new Snow Leopard and everything looks like crap and you can’t read it because all you have are boxes with A’s in them. Well rest easy, cause Apple actually solved this one for you and they let you know too but it just wasn’t a clear explanation.

When you started the computer it said that there was a font conflict and asked if it should ignore the conflict or move one of the files to the trash, well you should have moved it to the trash. Then just logged out and back in. That is it, empty the trash and you are completely done.

If you are having trouble with things like SIMBL and it’s plugins that is a different story, but as a hint: For now SIMBL stuff still works if you run the target application it in 32-Bit mode. Click the *.app file and then press Apple-I to bring up the info box where you can select 32-Bit only.

One last bit of advice is to ensure you upgrade programs like Little Snitch before you run your Snow Leopard Upgrade because it will not run without the upgrade and you will be left without a firewall until you upgrade, so might as well do it before and have it the whole time, or at least do it almost right away when you restart after the upgrade.