Logging the Switch

Posts

  • Jan 20, 2005

    Orion is back

    All right, everything is nice and shiny again. Orion, my “personal” server got a reinstall and a backup restore right after that. I hope it will be a bit more stable now, since it got uptimes of about… 3 days at max.

    So, my journal and website are back from hibernation. I don’t suppose you missed them :-)

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  • Jan 6, 2005

    Installed Debian GNU/Linux!!!

    All right then, I installed Linux on my Mac today, finally I was able to do so since the Debian installer from the 4th on has a kernel which supports this machine.

    A bit of fooling around with chroot and dpkg gave me a working system, which can also be accomplished by following the instructions in the thread on the debian-powerpc list .

    I’m happy and can go to sleep now :-)

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  • Dec 9, 2004

    Status

    I’m losing interest in installing Debian on my Mac; OS X is very nice after all. Meanwhile, the Debian PowerPC project is quarreling about going 64-bit all the way or just the kernel.

    Patrons argue that the amd64 team does exactly the same, while they could have a 32-bit userspace. Opposers argue that the archive is large enough already and it isn’t really profitable to have 64-bit binaries.

    In Ubuntu, PPC64 support has been postponed as a long term goal.

    So, the only way I could get Linux on my machine is using Gentoo, but I don’t want to compile each and every little package until I get a working system, I want a system that “Just Works™”.

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  • Dec 9, 2004

    Software Engineering Project started

    It has been a while since I wrote something here…

    The new trimester started last week on Monday (28 November). Together with the trimester also the Software Engineering Project (SEP) started, which is a two-trimester project teaching the process of managing and executing a larger software project.

    We got a three hour lecture in which every project could present themselves in order to let us give our preference. Our group of eight students chose a project for Océ as our first choice. Since it is tradition for SEP that you don’t get the first choice, that was not really our first choice. We’d rather program Sony Aibo robots or create a user interface for a scientific grid computing application.

    A few days later we received our assignment, we were appointed for the grid computing user interface. However, since we apparantly were the only group to have that assignment in our top 3, it was considered by senior management that the presentation gave a wrong idea of the assignment (very strange). We would receive a new assignment, which one was unclear until this Monday.

    So, Monday we received our actual assignment for the next half year. We’re going to create a model railroad control and surveillance system. For what I’ve read so far, it seems like an interesting challenge.

    Now, the time of sitting back and relaxing is getting at an end, since SEP is notorious to be taking up every last bit of spare time… I hope everything goes well and we’re going to have good cooperation within the group and with our project manager, our customer and especially senior management (they’ll be grading us June 2005).

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  • Oct 30, 2004

    Rendezvous is hip!

    I have a laptop functioning as my mail and printer server. Of course it would be cool to be able to print directly from OS X instead of making a PostScript and then scp’ing it to the laptop.

    Well, Apple has been busy supporting a very functional print system known as CUPS (Common Unix Printing System). Linux (and other Unix) users have been converting their systems from the old lpr-style daemons to this new system and printers are supporting IPP (Internet Printing Protocol). No reason for Apple to not convert their apparantly broken printing system of OS X 10.1 (I don’t know, but I’ve read a lot of bad things about it) to the modern CUPS.

    So, with CUPS in place, I can easily print on my laptop… Or so I thought… Of course, I can go and edit the /etc/cups/printers.conf file myself, but that would be no fun. No, it should work the Mac-way: Everything automatically configured with a single click.

    The answer to this is Rendezvous (or OpenTalk nowadays). Rendezvous is Apple’s implementation of the DNS-SD (DNS Service Discovery) protocol, used for announcing services on remote machines to your machine. It works only on the local network, since it uses a multicast link local address (IPv4) which cannot go through routers.

    I installed Apple’s mDNSResponder from their Rendezvous Developer Web Site and configured it so that my printer would be announced.

    Printer HP LaserJet 4M
_ipp._tcp.
txtvers=1_Arp=printers/LaserJet-4M_Aproduct=(LaserJet 4)^Apdl=application/postscript
631

    Now I start the responder, start an application I’d like to print from, select Print…, select Printer HP LaserJet 4M from the list, it is added automatically and I can press the Print button!

    Too bad this whole configuring has taken me a few days to figure out what software to use, what exactly should go where and then adding the printer is so fast… Since now my only other computer is already configured, the responder is a bit useless (not completely, it is also used to keep the printer in the list) so I am exploring new possibilities of Rendezvous like announcing a WebDAV server or a remote iTunes Library.

    Oh, and apparantly there is a bug in Howl mDNSResponder by Scott Herscher, which announces an incorrect DNS TXT record. I’ll have to mail him about that. I mailed to the rendezvous-dev list of Apple and Marc Krochmail of Apple was very helpful in detecting my problem.

    Update: In the meantime, a much better implementation of mDNS has emerged, called Avahi.

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