mike1210

Recently Ive pushed out several labs of Tiger 10.4.10 using ARD, scripts and Net Restore. This has gone well exept the Intel based Macs Dock icons are mainly showing up as question marks on the dock .

I build the image using an admin account and copied the dock into

/System/Library/User Template/English.lproj/Library/Preferences

then ran chmod 775 on the dock and gave permissions above for the user to read the dock. I did this with the power PC based macs and it works fine but not with the Intel's, even though the shortcuts still work and the users can navigate to applications the question marks are bugging me. I know it's petty but people who use these labs are petty and will nit pick if need be.

The Macs are bound to AD and users have basic user rights when they log in

Any way to get rid of the question marks???????

Markus

I've not seen it myself, but have had this reported to me by at least one client. They seemed to indicate that under 10.4.9 all was ok, it was only when going to 10.4.10 that they saw a problem.

Thoughts as to what to do, well, I'd certainly login as local admin to one of the machines and go into /Library/Caches/ and delete all of the com.apple.dock.iconcache.* files and then logout and log back in as one of the users that you have seen the problem with and see if it still exists.

It does sound as though the Dock is caching the icons as the apps do launch.

Another thought is that the Dock is being bladdy stupid when it comes to the alias info contained for the dock items. Typically there are two ways the Dock will find an item, one is using alias data, the other is using a posix path. I've no idea why it uses alias data when the path method a) works and b) is more unix like.

It would not suprise me in the least if the alias data contains some kind of unique reference to the machine the dock file was originally created on, and thus when it gets onto another computer that ref is no longer valid and so it can't find the app using the alais data and displays a question mark. When you come to launch it, the alias lookup fails, but the path lookup works, and that's why you can launch the app.

What you might want to do is open your com.apple.dock.plist file that you've put in the Prefs folder in the user template folder, in BBEdit and find the items relating to the apps you want in the dock, for example:

What you'd want to do is to select the item from <key>_CFURLAliasData</key> to </data> and delete it. It would then look like this:

As you can see the url string is still present so the path to the item is still intact. I've done this a few times and it does not seem to cause a problem. Worst case the Dock will add back an alais data item into the entry, but this is ok as it should then correctly reference the item.

Even when doing this you probably want to clear out the aforementioned caches.

Hope this helps

mike1210

A Million thanks as ever Markus, will try this today

mike1210

Finally got round to doing this and ............it worked

Importing into BBedit and doing as above fixed it tidy

Markus

Excellent! Why Apple insists in putting the alias data in there I don't know, they have a posix path to the item, and that should be good enough.