I Googled and found some articles and solutions here, here and here. I exhausted all the methods and I did not have DivXNetworks and ApplicationEnhancer.bundle in the directories mentioned in these links. I decided to go my own way.

What I did was to delete everything that was related to DivX. Since I did not have DivXNetworks, so I removed DivX folders in “/Library/Application Support” and “~/Library/Application Support” and also the DivX programs in Applications.

After the deletion, Finder still could not launch properly. I launched Console.app to examine system logs and found some errors in cache files com.apple.LaunchedServices*. I removed everything with com.apple.LaunchedServices in /Library/Caches.

Viola! Everything is back to normal again. DivX is a third party enhancement software and is not very stable. It seems like DivX has messed up with the system caches and somehow prevented Finder to launch.

I have spent two and half hours mingling with this problem. I hope my experience will save some of your time if you have the same problem as mine. I am going to take my supper.

Good luck!

Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard is the next version of the world most advanced operating system with a smaller footprint compared to its predecessor, Leopard. Snow Leopard will take full advantage of 64-bit and multi-core technology to the height.

Since Apple introduced Mac OS X in 2001, thousands of new features have been implemented and introduced. In Leopard, the ability to take advantage of multi-core and 64-bit addressing have opened up new dimension in desktop computing. Virtualization becomes possible. New features such as Time Machine automatically backup the Mac hard disk without user knowing.

Snow Leopard, to be released a year from now, is going to be smaller than Leopard but more powerful. Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the foot print on hard disk, using less disk space, freeing them for more music, photos and videos.

Snow Leopard fully makes use of 64-bit addressing to increase the RAM size to the theoretically 16TB, 500 times more than what is possible today. “Grand Central” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard brings unrivaled multi-core support and capabilities to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speed, drives performance faster in today’s modern processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. The result: more powerful applications at faster speed.

1. I have too much money to spend for a spare hard drive to clone my Mac hard drive.
2. I want to have a bootable external hard drive, installing on an external USB hard drive is not possible.
3. I want to upgrade my Mac’s hard drive, and I don’t want to do the installations and setup all over again

Obviously number 3 is my answer. I acquired a bigger capacity hard drive to upgrade my current 120GB hard drive in my MacBook. After some Googling around, I found an answer.

There is an Apple utility program called Apple restore or asr located in /usr/sbin. Connect your external USB hard drive and format it using Disk Utility. Open the Terminal in Applications -> Utilities. Type the following command line into the Terminal to copy your hard drive over your external drive.

% sudo asr -source /Volumes/OSX BOOT VOLUME NAME/ -target /Volumes/TARGET VOLUME NAME/

Replace “OSX BOOT VOLUME NAME” and “TARGET VOLUME NAME” with actual volume names. asr will take quite some time to copy the contents of hard drive to external hard drive. Get a cuppa, pop in your iPod earphone and relax.

When asr completes the execution, it will print a message:

asr: did not copy blessed information to target, which may have missing or out-of-date blessed folder information.

Then, bless your target drive with this:

% sudo bless -folder /Volumes/TARGET VOLUME NAME/System/Library/CoreServices

Now, the hard drive is bootable. Restart your Mac and hold down “option” key. A screen will appear allowing to choose which volume to boot from.

The problem lies within Apple’s new X11 in Leopard. The keyboard is not properly mapped after establishing the X tunnel. After searching the web and Ubuntu forum, I found a solution:

% ssh -X username@gutsy
% xmodmap -pke > ~/.keymap
% gnome-panel 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null & xmodmap ~/.keymap

Just do xmodmap map once will do. After that, ssh into Ubuntu and invoke gnome-panel.

Time Machine is a repository with version control system to keep track all the changes to your files and directories. When you plug in a FireWire hard disk, Leopard will automatically version all your files and directories onto the external hard disk. You are able to go back in time to look for a file (or directory), which you have deleted or modified, and to restore them.

Desktop Space gives you more desktop spaces to organize your works on the screen. It makes switching from task to task simple and easy with a click of the mouse.

It will be a nice upgrade but if you are developing software with Ada, unfortunately, you have to wait for a while. Ada does not come with xcode yet. The folks at MacAda is still working on a stable and working version of Ada compiler.