Jeff Kelley’s Blog

Prevent Mac OS X Leopard from Prompting You to Start Synergyd Every Time You Use SynergyKM

Jul 30

Jeff KelleyMac Tips command-line, Mac OS X, open-source, Synergy 4 Comments

So here’s an annoyance.  Having just installed SynergyKM, a great front-end for the awesome command-line utility Synergy, launching it would result in the following prompt:

The promt you get when launching SynergyKM

To fix this, you need to remove the extended attribute com.apple.quarantine that’s on the file.  Fire up Terminal and enter the following commands:

sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Library/PreferencePanes/SynergyKM.prefPane/Contents/Resources/Synergyd.app
sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Library/PreferencePanes/SynergyKM.prefPane/Contents/Resources/Synergyd.app/Contents/MacOS/Synergyd

That will remove the flags and prevent the prompt.

Normally, you’d only see this prompt once, but since installing it for all users changes permissions such that your user account can’t remove the attribute, it isn’t removed.

Note: This is assuming that you’ve installed it for all users.  If you’ve installed it for one user, it’ll be in ~/Library, not /Library.

Update: I’ve submitted a patch to SynergyKM’s SourceForge page, so if they accept it this will no longer be an issue.