Showing posts with label uninstall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label uninstall. Show all posts

Friday, June 16, 2017

Brew afsctool on your own for Mac OS Sierra

Recently, I came across an error message while compressing the document with HFS+ compression using open source tool afsctool. The repository on Homebrew project is still on version 1.6.4.

Message comes up every time: "Unable to compress file."

Someone on Github has figured out what's happening and has a solution. The Github user has pointed out that the filesystem on Sierra returns a different value of file type than its predecessor. This renders afsctool useless and return error message at all time. But the suggested change has never been updated on the original source repository of afsctool.

With a little patience for not using this tool, I made up my mind. I think it's time to homebrew our software tool before the Author patches the source code for this.

Here's the recipe:

Before your own compiling work, you might want to uninstall the outdated brew formula for afsctool:

$
$ brew uninstall afsctool

Make sure gcc is installed properly on your Mac.

Take a look at the Hombrew formulas for afsctool via http://brewformulas.org/Afsctool

Take a look at the source file from there: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/tree/master/Formula/afsctool.rb

We found a URL from there: https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0BwQlnXqL939ZQjBQNEhRQUo0aUk

Also, take a look at the parameters called from the def() function call. Highlighted parameters will be useful for compiling:
def install
    cd "afsctool_34" do
      system ENV.cc, ENV.cflags, "-lz",
         "-framework", "CoreServices", "-o", "afsctool", "afsctool.c"

      bin.install "afsctool"
    end
end

Grab the source code ZIP of afsctool from the above URL.

Extract the ZIP file to a temporary location.

Find afsctool.c and amend the file according to this Github post.

Try compiling the .c file afsctool.c with GCC compiler using the aforementioned parameters from brew formula:

$
$ gcc -lz -framework CoreServices -o afsctool afsctool.c

Copy the compile file afsctool to the common bin folder for easy access:

$
$ cp ./afsctool /usr/local/bin/afsctool

Well, it's time to have a try on our new compiled tool:

$ afsctool -cv ./afsctool.c
/afsctool_34/afsctool.c:
File content type: public.c-source
File size (uncompressed data fork; reported size by Mac OS 10.6+ Finder): 79339 bytes / 79 KB (kilobytes) / 77 KiB (kibibytes)
File size (compressed data fork - decmpfs xattr; reported size by Mac OS 10.0-10.5 Finder): 13396 bytes / 16 KB (kilobytes) / 16 KiB (kibibytes)
File size (compressed data fork): 13412 bytes / 16 KB (kilobytes) / 16 KiB (kibibytes)
Compression savings: 83.1%
Number of extended attributes: 4
Total size of extended attribute data: 50 bytes
Approximate overhead of extended attributes: 1608 bytes
Approximate total file size (compressed data fork + EA + EA overhead + file overhead): 18306 bytes / 18 KB (kilobytes) / 18 KiB (kibibytes)

Finally, the compression works again.

By the way, we may need to keep watching until one day an updated brew formula is available to tackle this problem for Sierra.



Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Completely UNINSTALL corrupted instance of Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 is a comprehensive programming suite for app development on Windows platform. It can be good or evil when it comes to such an elephant build with additional packages and tools to be installed all at one time. It takes lot of space and requires attention while doing uninstallation. Any error generated during the uninstallation process could actually break the whole thing. You can repair it via the installation wizard before you can actually uninstall it.



When you land on this article, you might actually have left the installation in a broken state and you might have desparately searched through the Internet to find a resolution for all these. The thing is you just cannot uninstall VS2010 in a normal way. Indeed, Microsoft provide a better way for uninstallation in VS2012 or newer while we're still sticking to the 6 years old VS build.

Microsoft has released a tool to fix all kinds of registry errors or blocking issue during uninstallation of any program, i.e., any program which appears in the uninstall list.

URL:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/17588/fix-problems-that-block-programs-from-being-installed-or-removed

It's a troubleshooting tool which guides you through to the right option which actually fixes those strange errors for you and uninstalls the program as specified from there. I have tried this tool and ultimately removed my broken VS build on Windows 2008 server. It claims to support Windows version from 7 to 10.

You may need to try a further cleanup by uninstalling those depending components of Visual Studio via Control Panel | Programs and Features.

Finally, it frees up huge amount of diskspace on the server.