Facebook Embed

30 October 2007

Time Machine

Looks like Apple's "Time Machine" feature can be made to work with a non-Apple fileserver. From the helpful hint at the following URL, I now have it working to my fileserver, a FreeBSD machine with netatalk... http://blog.danielparnell.com/?p=43
Now... I just need some more storage space...

29 October 2007

Leopard is a bit spotty

It appears that the formerly excellent X11 support in Tiger has regressed and the X11 support in Leopard, despite being based upon the more modern Xorg codebase, shows significant regression in functionality.
  1. Unable to move windows on to secondary displays

  2. Unable to be configured to use TCP connections, except by manual startup (Do we really need multiple Xquartz processes?)

  3. DPI is fubar - I prefer to set 75DPI even though I have large displays - I have large displays because I want more stuff on the screen!

  4. Display feels slower.

Some of the other new features are nice - the new SSH AskPasswd program is a nice new touch but I think I shall just have to bite the bullet and 'upgrade' to the Tiger X11 release. I shall be following the instructions detailed at http://aaroniba.net/articles/x11-leopard.html

28 October 2007

Leopard's CUPS defaults

Mac OS 10.5 was not discovering my CUPS printers like how 10.4 was. It turns out that Apple has decided to only discover printers by Bonjour only and has turned off CUPS own detection. This seems like a poor decision.
I found the answer at http://mcdevzone.com/2007/10/28/printer-fix-for-leopard

27 October 2007

Leopard Review

Here is my not-very-objective review of MacOS 10.5 aka Leopard.
Installation was pretty painless - I uninstalled things like APE beforehand and after reading the various blogs where people had hanging installs, I am sure glad that I did take the precaution. It feels faster on my Quad-G5 PowerMac - things seem to respond faster. Visually - I'm going to have to change the default background - some of the annoying artifacts on the menu bar are from the background image. The work done to Mail - is excellent. Much improved responsiveness. The iChat improvements are very welcome - it can now be signed-in on multiple accounts.
I have not managed to get Time Machine working from using a FreeBSD fileserver, even when I have netatalk installed and operational - There has been some skectchy reports of workarounds but its not working here. I really don't want to have an external drive for each Mac for backup - I would prefer to be able to back them up centrally over the network.
With respect to software development - time will tell. There is already some indication that the assembler/linker may have some problems with some inline PowerPC assembler which prevents the build of the glib macport from completing successfully.

26 October 2007

Mac OS X Leopard has arrived

Actually, the small box arrived about an hour ago. Clearing some old work source repositories from my hard drive and other general 'housekeeping' duties. I haven't eagerly anticipated a new OS release for a long time: I would probably compare this to the time when OS/2 2.1 was released with its full 32bit Presentation Manager or perhaps even OS/2 Warp 3 with its UI enhancements... As to what features I am looking forward to exploiting, I would say in no particular order: Spaces, XCode, DTrace, Shark. There is a bunch of other 'nice to have' features... I guess I will see how well I like it after I install it.

24 October 2007

We can smell the smoke from here.

All throughout today and yesterday, there has been ash falling from the sky from all the fires around near Los Angeles. We have had all the windows closed to keep the dust and ash out - going outside for a short while irritates my eyes something awful and that is even though I take a powerful anti-allergy medicine daily.