Today I’ve been playing around with iSync, trying to get it to sync my Mac’s addressbook with my Nokia 6086 mobile phone (a little bit old, I know, but it’s small and it works). After trying with several methods, the two that have given me the best results are:
Archivo de la Categoría 'MacOS X'
…hello rTorrent!
In the end mldonkey was too heavy for the slug. While downloading just one or two torrents it behaved quite well, but with some more and one of them big (>1Gb) it started eating up more and more memory and the slug became… sluggish. X-D
So I’m trying with different alternatives. Right now I’m running rTorrent on the server and nTorrent as a GUI on my Mac. Looks promising. 
Ladies and gentleman, let me please introduce you to my new server, the one I’ve been blogging about lately:
What? You don’t see it? Yes! The small grey box on top of the iomega disk, slightly bigger than the Fonera…
In case you don’t know it yet, it’s a Linksys NSLU2, a small device around $100 that comes with two USB2 ports and an ethernet connection. Plug an external USB hard drive to it and it’ll become available over the network like a NAS share. And the best part is: you can flash its firmware and install Debian!! 
It’s not that powerful, it has an XScale (ARM) processor at 266Mhz and only 32Mb of RAM. There are pages explaining how to install up to 256Mb. Nevertheless, it works and is small, doesn’t make noise, and has a small electrical consumption.
Up to now I’m running the following on it and it works quite well:
- djbdns
- netatalk
- mldonkey!!!
- samba, so that I can watch movies directly on myh XBox with XBox Media Center
# cat /proc/cpuinfo Processor : XScale-IXP42x Family rev 2 (v5l) BogoMIPS : 266.24 Features : swp half fastmult edsp CPU implementer : 0×69 CPU architecture: 5TE CPU variant : 0×0 CPU part : 0×41f CPU revision : 2 Cache type : undefined 5 Cache clean : undefined 5 Cache lockdown : undefined 5 Cache format : Harvard I size : 32768 I assoc : 32 I line length : 32 I sets : 32 D size : 32768 D assoc : 32 D line length : 32 D sets : 32 Hardware : Linksys NSLU2 Revision : 0000 Serial : 0000000000000000 # free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 29988 28988 1000 0 404 4808 -/+ buffers/cache: 23776 6212 Swap: 979924 41164 938760 # uname -a Linux eliza 2.6.18-6-ixp4xx #1 Tue Feb 12 00:57:53 UTC 2008 armv5tel GNU/Linux # pstree init-+-afpd—afpd |-atalkd |-atd |-avahi-daemon—avahi-daemon |-cnid_metad |-cron |-dbus-daemon |-events/0 |-getty |-khelper |-klogd |-ksoftirqd/0 |-kthread-+-aio/0 | |-kblockd/0 | |-khubd | |-3*[kjournald] | |-kmirrord | |-kpsmoused | |-kseriod | |-kswapd0 | |-2*[pdflush] | |-scsi_eh_0 | `-usb-storage |-mtdblockd |-nmbd |-papd |-portmap |-rpc.statd |-slpd |-smbd—smbd |-sshd—sshd—sshd—bash—su—bash—pstree |-svscanboot-+-readproctitle | `-svscan-+-supervise—dnscache | |-3*[supervise—multilog] | |-supervise—tinydns | `-supervise—mlnet—mlnet—mlnet |-syslogd `-udevd
After recompiling netatalk the other day in order to get it to work with Leopard, the next step was getting Time Machine to make backups over the network (and a wireless one by the way).
Problem is: despite the netatalk-powered network shares worked great for “regular” files, when Time Machine started preparing the backup it always gave me an error.
Googling about it I’ve found several stories with different soluctions, some of which worked for some people, some others didn’t. The one that did it for me is this one:
Basically it consists in creating a “sparse bundle” disk image on the local hard drive using MacOS X’s Disk Utility, giving it a specific name, moving it to the network share and then configure Time Machine to use that share.
Worked for me.
I’m installing a new fileserver at home (more on this one of these days…) and after installing the netatalk package I wasn’t able to connect to it from MacOS X Leopard, it returned an error after the user/pass prompt.
Googling about it I’ve found that you need to recompile the netatalk package, more info on this and a detailed step-by-step here: Make Netatalk talk to Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5)
Vía MacUser me entero de que hoy es el séptimo aniversario del lanzamiento de MacOS X, el 24 de marzo de 2001.
Por aquel entonces trabajaba en la empresa tecnológica de un grupo editorial, por lo que teníamos algo de contacto con los Macintosh, bastante comunes en ese sector. La verdad es que el system 9 era un mundo aparte, sólo los 2 ó 3 gurús sabían cómo resolver algún problema. Además algunas cosas no funcionaban todo lo bien que se espera de un sistema operativo moderno, por ejemplo la pila TCP/IP del OS9 era un truño, que unido a la “falsa” multitarea provocaba que cada vez que el ordenador accedía a la red se quedaba completamente frito. Así que cuando empezamos a leer que Apple iba a sacar una nueva versión del sistema y además basado en UNIX, a todos se nos pusieron los dientes largos, especialmente a los frikis de Mac y a mi, al friki linuxero de la empresa.
A las primeras versiones les faltaba todavía pulir bastante la integración entre los distintos subsistemas y programas que venían de serie (CUPS, Apache, Samba, OpenLDAP, etc.), y sobre todo se achacaba mucho el problema de la falta de aplicaciones nativas para OS X lo que obligaba a ejecutar las viejas aplicaciones de OS9 bajo el emulador del Classic. Pero revisión tras revisión se fue mejorando todo, y MacOS X 10.4 y el nuevo Leopard son una auténtica gozada.
“Fast forward” siete años hasta el presente, y nos encontramos con que desde el verano pasado mi ordenador en casa es un MacBook Pro al que ni se me ha ocurrido probar a hacerle otra partición para meterle Linux (ni mucho menos Windows) de lo a gusto que me encuentro con el OS X.
A small detail about Time Machine I hadn’t thought about before: this article recommends removing all the virtual disks from virtual machines like VMWare, Virtual Box, et al. from the backup.
Makes sense: Time Machine works at a file level, in the end it’s just something like this but with an über-posh interface. So every time you boot one of your VMs, some small change will inevitably be made on some file inside it, causing Time Machine to store a new copy of the full virtual disk.
Two useful MacOS X utilities:
- AppCleaner: it helps you to completely uninstall applications from your system. When you install an app it copies several files (like plugins, extra libraries, etc.) outside the Applications folder, but those files don’t get deleted when you drag the app to the trash can. But I think that the best way to describe AppCleaner is saying it’s a free AppZapper clone. It looks exactly the same, same interface, same functionality, usage, everything.
- MonoLingual: both the MacOS X system itself and almost every app you can think of come with translations for a shitload of foreign languages, which are a waste of hard drive space if you’re not going to use them. Besides, nowadays almost every binary is a “Universal Binary”, which is just a package with an Intel binary and a PowerPC one. Even more wasted space. MonoLingual allows you to remove every language you don’t need, and the binaries for the architecture you’re not going to use. Or like with AppCleaner: it’s a free Xslimmer clone. Just to get you an idea: after removing all translation files but the Spanish and English ones, and the PowerPC binaries, it has freed 2.5Gb from my system.
I’ve been playing around a little bit with the MacOS X port of Virtual Box, and it looks really promising. Speed-wise it runs quite OK, I couldn’t tell wether or not it’s on par with VMWare Fusion. But I’ve had small problems with the keyboard (couldn’t get the alt and command keys to work right) and the “desktop resolution resizing” when in windowed mode.
Following these instrucions, I’ve made a small shell-script that converts a .vmdk disk image file from VMWare to a .vdi one for Virtual Box. It should detect the OS (Mac or Linux) and warn you in case you miss some of the dependencies (QEMU ’s qemu-img and Virtual Box’s vditool). It can be downloaded here:
Via Applesfera I’ve learnt about two applications developed by Hanynet that allow you to manage the internal firewall on MacOS X Leopard:
- NoobProof, easier to use for the average user, and
- WaterRoof (cool name XD), more detailed, for the technically-savvy
Very useful.
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