Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

CDs & DVDs

This panel is new in Mac OS X 10.2—and it’s rather handy (Figure 8-2). It lets you tell the Mac what it should do whenever it detects the insertion of a CD or DVD disc. For example, when you insert a music CD, you probably want the Mac to open the iTunes program (Chapter 10) automatically so that you can listen to the music, or convert it into MP3 files on your hard drive. Similarly, when you insert a picture CD (such as a Kodak Photo CD), you probably want iPhoto to open automatically, in readiness to import the pictures from the CD into your photo collection—and when you insert a DVD from Blockbuster, you want the Mac’s DVD Player program to open automatically.

Figure 8-2. You can tell the Mac exactly which program to launch when you insert each kind of disc—or tell it to do nothing at all.

System Preferences: Under the Hood

The entire System Preferences program is nothing more than a series of graphical front ends for underlying Unix settings. (If you know Unix and feel so inclined, in fact, you can bypass the System Preferences panel completely. Using the defaults command, you can make any of the changes described in this chapter in Mac OS X’s Terminal program.)

The individual preference panels are represented by “package” icons in your various Library folders. For example, icons in the basic Mac OS X set are in System→Library→ PreferencePanes. Mac OS X also checks the ...