I’ve broken down. I’m installing Microsoft Office on my machine(a legal copy!) - several of my tasks require me to work with Excel tables, and there’s simply nothing on the Mac that does that nicely. Yes, there’s OpenOffice, but it’s ugly and X11. I actually care how applications on my desktop look.
Since I really don’t trust MS further than I can throw Steve Ballmer, I’m suspicious it’ll phone home. Back in my pre-intel days, I had Little Snitch installed to watch for these kinds of things. I never bought it, though. It didn’t seem necessary at the time.
So now, when I try to install Little Snitch, the installer gets confused because there’s an old version. When I try to uninstall that old version, I get this error message:
Googling wasn’t helpful either. So, after some digging around, I found the solution.
rm Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.cache
rm Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.searchindexcache
And you can remove the offending preferences pane.
Little Snitch still wasn’t happy, though. After running the installer, the preferences kept telling me that “The preference pane you are installing is already installed. Do you want to replace the existing preference pane?”. Selecting “OK” ends you in the same trouble I described above.
The secret turns out to be selecting “Cancel”. Intuitive, no?
Seriously, Apple & Little Snitch - What the %@ ?
(BTW: MS does indeed connect to the outside world. Supposedly, it’s the auto-update daemon…)
Robert, you may try NeoOffice, it doesn’t require X11 anymore and it works like a dream. I just installed it a few days ago and I’m very happy with it.
Regarding MS Office, you need to be extremely careful, installing illegal copy is a crime against Microsoft, installing any copy of Microsoft Office on Mac is a crime against humanity
Use Tables instead of Excel! http://osx.hyperjeff.net/Apps