IBM Firefox failed to be updated

Just for the record, IBM does not develop Firefox. It's just a rebranded version of Firefox ESR, still pure Mozilla.

When installing Mac@IBM App Store (MIAS), the IBM Firefox got installed along the way, however much you like the vanilla Firefox and reluctant you feel for the customised version. For the past few days it kept reminding me of updating to the version 31.8.0. But every time I opened the update dialog and let it proceed, it stuck at contacting the update server. The same symptom has been reported a lot in the IBM Apple / Mac Community, until I found this one.

It turned out that /Applications/IBM Firefox.app is owned by root. No wonder it couldn't be updated when running by an unprivileged user. After running the following command and launching Firefox again, it was successfully updated!
sudo chown -R tony:staff IBM\ Firefox.app


Update 2015/09/18: I've been setting up another MacBook Pro these days and found happily that MIAS now installs Firefox with correct permissions.

Installing Eclipse and Rational Team Concert on Mac OS X

My job involves dealing with Rational Team Concert (RTC) a lot. So switching to Mac OS X means to establish an RTC working environment (Eclipse + RTC client extension) as I have on Linux. Years ago I wrote a tutorial (on Google Docs as I recall) on how to achieve this on Linux. Now on OS X it's pretty much the same process.

1. Install Java. Hmm... Pity that I didn't do this manually. My current Java was installed automatically along with Mac@IBM App Store. Believe me I'm a control freak in terms of my computer. So if I had the chance I'd have installed it manually. But really the Mac@IBM App Store installation didn't provide many options other than clicking next.
2. Install Eclipse. I've tried both the Luna (4.4) version and the Mars (4.5) version. They are pretty much the same in terms of installation, both involving extracting the tar ball at a specific directory (e.g. /opt). The difference is the file hierarchy. Pay specific attention to where the directory dropins and binary eclipse are. We will be using them at a later time. Another difference is that Mars ships with an installer which I didn't use because of, again, the control issue.
3. Install RTC client.

1. Download RTC client. If you are to connect to more than one RTC server, download the client version that matches the oldest server, because an old RTC client could get along with a newer server but not the other way around. For any specific version of RTC client, jazz.net provides several installation options. The only one that could be consumed in a drop-in approach is called Client for Eclipse xxx IDE, under the IBM Installation Manager Repositories category.
2. Extract RTC client. To be consumed in a drop-in manner the extension needs to be put in certain directory structure - features and plugins directories under eclipse. So after extraction of the zip file, find features and plugins inside im/repo/rtc-client-full-p2-offering/offering-repo and put them under eclipse. Whatever left in im is of no interest to us.
   /opt/eclipse-ext/rtc
   └── eclipse
       ├── features
       └── plugins
3. Configure Eclipse to use RTC client. Put in the dropins directory a text file containing the path of the RTC client.
   /opt/Eclipse.app
   └── Contents
       ├── Eclipse
       │   ├── dropins
       │   │   └── rtc.txt
       └── MacOS
           └── eclipse
   
   [tony@tonys-mbp ~]$ cat /opt/Eclipse.app/Contents/Eclipse/dropins/rtc.txt
   path=/opt/eclipse-ext/rtc
4. Launch Eclipse. The binary is located in Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS. Of course certain parameters are allowed and what I'd use is
   /opt/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse -data "${data_dir}" -vmargs -Xmx1024m

Update 2015/09/22: As of the original writing the RTC client version I was using was 5.0.2. Today I tried RTC 6.0 and it worked perfect as well with the aforementioned way of installation.