Month: January 2020

Install tmux on macOS without Homebrew

Many people (including me) don’t want to use Homebrew. But if you search online for “How to install tmux on macOS” you will found mostly Homebrew descriptions. So here now the very easy solution without.

Requirements

In case that Command Line Tools are not installed, execute following command and follow the installation steps in new popup window. This process can take some time, so be patient.

# install Command Line Tools
$ xcode-select --install

# verify installation (optional)
$ ls /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/

Installation

To execute next steps you need to download and unzip two release tarballs. Here you will found latest version of libevent and tmux (ncurses is already installed on macOS).

# change into unzipped libevent directory
$ cd Downloads/libevent-2.1.11-stable/

# check dependencies
$ ./configure

# build package
$ make

# install package
$ sudo make install

# change into unzipped tmux directory
$ cd Downloads/tmux-3.0a/

# check dependencies
$ ./configure

# build package
$ make

# install package
$ sudo make install

# show tmux version (optional)
$ tmux -V

That’s it already. If you’re new to tmux you should have a look on this Cheat Sheet.

Get IP of headless Virtualbox VM

This short article will describe how you will get quickly the IP for an headless running Virtualbox VM. For demonstration purpose, I have assigned an “Bridged Interface” on NIC 1. So the IP is dynamically allocated (IP address is being assigned by DHCP).

# start VM headless (if not running)
$ VBoxManage startvm --type headless "vm name"

# check VM state (optional)
$ VBoxManage showvminfo "vm name" | grep "State"

# show IP
$ VBoxManage guestproperty get "vm name" "/VirtualBox/GuestInfo/Net/0/V4/IP"
...
Value: 172.20.10.6
...

That was super easy … now you can connect via SSH (if SSH service is running).

# start SSH connection
$ ssh -C4 remote_user@172.20.10.6

Fix macOS wireless issues (hard way)

Sometimes I run into issues with my macOS wireless. Yes I know that most problems come by myself by wrong configurations. But here now a very handy short way which helped me already many times. Attention! You will need it to rejoin the network.

# change directory
$ cd /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/

# list files (optional)
$ ls -la

# delete specific files
$ rm com.apple.airport.preferences.plist com.apple.network.identification.plist NetworkInterfaces.plist preferences.plist

Finally reboot the system and join your network. This forces the macOS to create all preference files again.