MacOS – Why are some icons sideways on the desktop

Start by making some tests in your Terminal:

1. Use nslookup and try to lookup certain stuff (www.google.com, www.ibm.com, etc) See how it works from there.

2. Use ‘dig’ (another command) to do the same. Dig will be much more verbose and will show you more information about the Lookup per se.

3. Make sure your DNSs are correct in /etc/resolv.conf (try google’s 8.8.8.8 if unsure).

4. Check your Console for possible messages related to Network adapters or loops going on.

Edit: It all seems “normal”. Do you use Shared networking? Can you try disabling vnic0 and vnic1 (those are the parallels ones). I recall having slowness problems (back in parallels 3.x) which I fixed by using Bridged Networking instead of shared. I didn’t think the issue was still an issue a few years later!

The cmdpack you downloaded are command line tools. If you have a recent mac, you should have downloaded the Mac OS X (64-bit, x86_64) version.

To use these tools, you'll need to venture into the UNIX command line. This is analogous to the command prompt of Windows, and can be accessed using the Terminal application in /Applications/Utilities.

Once you've downloaded the cmdpack.gz file, uncompress it to a directory by double-clicking it. For ease of explanation, then drop the .ecm file you want to work with into that directory. Open Terminal (either find it in Utilities or Spotlight search for it) and then navigate to the cmdpack directory (the easiest way to do this is to type cd followed by a space, and then drag the directory to your terminal window--the path of the folder will be inserted--then hit return).

When you're in the appropriate working directory, you can type ls to list its contents. The executable you want to run is most likely unecm. The easiest way to run an executable in your current working directory is by prefixing it with ./. If you type ./unecm, the command will run and show you usage information. If you already dropped your .ecm file into this directory, unencoding it should be as simple as ./unecm myecmfile.ecm

To recap:

1. Download the Mac OS X (64-bit, x86_64) command-line pack and uncompress/ungzip it.
2. Open Terminal and navigate to the uncompressed directory (for me this command was cd /Users/nreilingh/Downloads/cmdpack-1.02-macosx-x86_64)
3. Run unecm as necessary with ./unecm after cding to the ungzipped directory.