It’s the weekend, and you want to kick back and have some fun. To help you with that, we just wanted to direct your attention to an article entitled, “Highly Addictive Puzzle/Arcade Games for Linux“, which you might tend to overlook because, after all, Mac OS X is not Linux. But what we’ve discovered is that all of the games mentioned in the article, except for the very last one, have a Mac version available!
The article mentions a game called Crack Attack, but the author forgot to include a link to the game’s site. So we have rectified that here.
Some games have better Mac support than others - for example, the Mac port for Pingus is listed as “unofficial.”
But hey, if you like games, it’s probably worth trying them all to see if you like any of them - there’s something here for many and varied tastes. Unless you’re an uber-geek, pay no attention to Biniax - it’s the only game on the list that doesn’t seem to have any available Mac version. You could, however, download the source code from this page and try to create a Mac version, and for a true Mac geek we imagine that might be as much fun as actually playing the game!
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We never intended this to turn into a trilogy when we started out, but our quest to find the perfect GUI to set up SSH connections using MacFUSE and sshfs (or, perhaps, as a replacement to sshfs) has turned up yet another candidate. This one may be the best of all, but there’s only one thing about it that gives us pause.
The program is called MacFusion and it’s described as “an open source project released under the Apache License.” (Edit: Although what is supposedly an updated BETA release can be found at macfusionapp.org, we could not get that version to mount a remote filesystem, and it didn’t seem to have as many options in the preferences. Therefore, these instructions are for the original version, which works well for us under Leopard). You can download it freely, but the author does accept donations. It’s more similar to Secure Remote Disk than to sshfs, but it seems to have everything that those other programs are missing. The feature list for MacFusion is as follows:
- FUSE filesystems so far: SSHFS, CurlFTPFS
- Passwords can be stored in the keychain for SSH or FTP server
- Support for public/private key authentication using SSH (Use SSHKeyChain)
- Stores favorites and allows automatic connection of favorites on start (emphasis added!)
- Configurable behavior of mounted filesystems on system sleep
- Handles SFTP:// and FTP:// URL links. Try setting it up with Quicksilver!
- Sparkle updating
To get it running you simply download it from Google Code and install it as you would any other Mac application (of course, you must have already installed MacFUSE). The first time you start it, it comes up with a rather ominous warning:
We decided to go ahead and try using the program anyway, but obviously we can’t guarantee that you won’t have any problems if you do. However, MacFusion is so much nicer to work with that we’d suggest at least trying it. You can always uninstall it if it doesn’t work properly for you.
MacFusion is a bit different from the other programs we have covered in that it puts an icon in the top menu bar. When you click on that icon, you get a drop-down menu:
There aren’t many preferences but you will probably want to at least check the “Start MacFusion on Login” checkbox (you’ll see why in a moment):
After you set the preferences, you’ll want to edit favorites:
In the favorites window, click the + at the bottom to add a favorite, then click on SSH to add an SSH connection. Note that with MacFusion you can also connect to an FTP server, something the other programs aren’t designed to do:
A window will pop up allowing you to add the details of your connection. Note that the name you give in the “Name” field is actually used as the name you see when you move the volume into the Finder left-hand sidebar (unlike Secure Remote Disk).
Once you fill in the details and click OK, it will try to connect to the server. Note that you can make more than one connection to the same server. When the server is mounted the button will turn green; while you are still waiting for it to mount it will be yellow:
Note that when you are in this panel and you highlight a mounted server, the “Mount” button in the lower right hand corner changes to “Unmount”, so you can mount and unmout your servers at will. But also note the “Auto” checkbox next to each server - if you check that, then when you start up MacFusion it will automatically mount that server. Now keep in mind that in the program’s preferences you can set it to “Start MacFusion on Login”, and now you see that you can have your servers automatically mounted at login or startup.
Unlike Secure Remote Disk, but like sshfs, the pseudo-drives representing your servers are placed in the /Volumes directory, not in subdirectories off your user directory. This is the preferred location. As with sshfs, you can also get to them by clicking on any Finder window, then selecting “Go” in the top menu bar, and then in the dropdown selecting “Computer” (this was all detailed in the first article of this series) . When the Finder window pops up that shows all your drives, you can drag the ones that represent your SSH connections to Finder’s left-hand sidebar (under the devices, not the shared locations), to make them accessible in all Finder windows. The difference with MacFusion is that it will show the name you gave the connection, not the net address of the connected server, so if you give each connection a unique name then that’s what you’ll see in the sidebar.
As before, connections in the Finder sidebar will have an “eject” button next to the name, which if clicked should break the connection to the remote server. But that’s not as important in MacFusion, because you can simply click on its icon in the top menu bar and then use the GUI to mount or unmount connected servers.
And, as we noted above, MacFusion allows FTP servers to be mounted in addition to SSH servers. FTP isn’t as secure as SSH, but in some cases you may have FTP access to a server, but not SSH access. That said, Finder by itself is perfectly capable of making a read-only FTP connection by selecting “Go” in the top menu bar and then “Connect to Server”, but it may be easier to manage FTP connections using MacFusion. We probably wouldn’t install MacFUSE and MacFusion simply to make FTP connections, but if we were already using it to manage SSH connections we’d certainly use it manage our FTP connections as well.
(Edit: Since we first published this article, we came across a post on macosxhints.com that explains how to Mount a gateway-accessed server directly using MacFUSE. You might want to do this if, for some reason (usually involving firewall restrictions) you have to chain a connection through multiple servers. In addition, a comment by a reader of that article mentions that MacFusion can be used to facilitate this. Most users won’t need to do this, but this information is provided for those who do).
In this series of three articles (which was only intended to be a single article at the outset), we have told you about sshfs, Secure Remote Disk, and MacFusion. While all appear to work, MacFusion is in our opinion the hands-down winner in terms of functionality and ease of use. Were it not for that initial warning, which screams out to us that the developer may no longer be interested in keeping this software current with upgrades of MacFUSE, we’d have no problem giving MacFusion our highest recommendation. Despite the warning, MacFusion seems to work with the current version of MacFUSE (as of this writing). And there is some degree of support available through the MacFusion-devel group on Google Groups.
One of our goals in this effort has been to find a no-cost equivalent for a particular commercial program that shall remain nameless in this article, but that also uses MacFUSE at its core. We think maybe it’s a just a bit bit nervy to build your commercial product around someone else’s free software, but we just hope that the company behind the commercial product is compensating the author of MacFUSE in some way. But for those who would rather not purchase that product, we think that for now at least, the combination of MacFusion and MacFUSE gives you most (if not all) of the functionality of that other software. And as we’ve said before, we love free software here in the CrabApple Forest!
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