Not that there should have been any doubts, but now it's official: all my MacOS X games are 100% Spyware, Adware, Trojan and Virus free.
Thank you SOFTPEDIA.
Wednesday 30 April 2008
100% Clean award guaranteed by SOFTPEDIA
Not that there should have been any doubts, but now it's official: all my MacOS X games are 100% Spyware, Adware, Trojan and Virus free.
Thank you SOFTPEDIA.
Wednesday 23 April 2008
Mac shares on Server 2003
Todays challenge was to get file sharing working for MacOS 9 clients on our new Windows 2003 server.
Installing "Services for Macintosh" is straight forward, and as such I won't go into that here (if you are stuck at this point then here is a hint for you: in "Add / Remove Programs" there is a "Windows Components" section, you install it from there).
Once it was installed, I created a new Macintosh share (and received a warning that the share would be created as read-only for mac clients).
But when trying to browse to the server from the Macs - I couldn't see the server at all.
The reason for this turns out to be simple. We have two onboard network adapters on the server, but are only using one of them. The AppleTalk network protocol will only work against a single card in the machine, and it had associated itself with the wrong one. Ticking the "Accept inbound connections on this adapter" checkbox in the "Appletalk Network Protocol" on the active card (and selecting the correct Appletalk zone from the pulldown list) was enough to get this working.
Well, nearly. The server showed up OK, but none of the clients could connect to it. They get an authentication error instead.
To get this working, first launch the server manager (right-click on "My Computer" and choose "Manage"), then right-click on "Shared Folders" and select "Configure File Server for Macintosh". The default authentication type will be "Microsoft only". Change it to "Apple Cleartext or Microsoft".
Now the Mac clients can log in.
But wait - the share is still read only!
To sort this call up the properties of the share (in the server manager) and untick the "This volume is read-only" checkbox that is selected by default(!).
And there we have it. Job done!
Installing "Services for Macintosh" is straight forward, and as such I won't go into that here (if you are stuck at this point then here is a hint for you: in "Add / Remove Programs" there is a "Windows Components" section, you install it from there).
Once it was installed, I created a new Macintosh share (and received a warning that the share would be created as read-only for mac clients).
But when trying to browse to the server from the Macs - I couldn't see the server at all.
The reason for this turns out to be simple. We have two onboard network adapters on the server, but are only using one of them. The AppleTalk network protocol will only work against a single card in the machine, and it had associated itself with the wrong one. Ticking the "Accept inbound connections on this adapter" checkbox in the "Appletalk Network Protocol" on the active card (and selecting the correct Appletalk zone from the pulldown list) was enough to get this working.
Well, nearly. The server showed up OK, but none of the clients could connect to it. They get an authentication error instead.
To get this working, first launch the server manager (right-click on "My Computer" and choose "Manage"), then right-click on "Shared Folders" and select "Configure File Server for Macintosh". The default authentication type will be "Microsoft only". Change it to "Apple Cleartext or Microsoft".
Now the Mac clients can log in.
But wait - the share is still read only!
To sort this call up the properties of the share (in the server manager) and untick the "This volume is read-only" checkbox that is selected by default(!).
And there we have it. Job done!
Friday 18 April 2008
Adventures with Ubuntu
Seeing as my Ubuntu CDs had arrived, I decided to see how the Toshiba would run with it.
First problem - installation. The install routine needs over 350 meg of ram to be able to run (!). I found this hard to believe - but three hours into trying to install via the desktop shortcut on the live CD I'm forced to agree. It doesn't work.
Since I still wanted to see Ubuntu running from a proper install on the laptop I downloaded the "Alternative Install" ISO which has a text mode installer. This works fine - in fact the only long winded part of it was waiting for the files to copy. FreeSpire took around half-an-hour to install, Ubuntu has taken that long already and is still going (and this is without installing any updates).
Select and install software
Please wait...
Well, that took some time. Over an hour for the install, and that's without any updates. But, at least it's now in and working, right?
Well, nearly.
After rebooting and logging in as my new user I received an error that the clock was probably set wrong (which was correct, I'd not got around to setting the date correctly yet, so it was showing as some time in 2000). Not to worry, there was an option to allow me to set the time. Choosing to set the time resulted in an error message that I had insufficient rights to change the clock.
At this point I was left looking at a plain orange screen. No icons, no toolbar, nothing.
Could this be Ubuntu's own "Orange screen of Death?"
One forced restart later I chose to ignore the date error and was able to log in OK.
Normally I use KDE for my desktop, so using Gnome is a new experience, but I've got to say that it isn't bad. Connecting to my wireless network was a breeze using "Network Manager" which was already running in the task bar.
Updates installed easily too, in fact installing system updates on Ubuntu is every bit as easy as on Windows, with the bonus that many of your applications can be updated too.
Watching videos was also straight forward. Connecting to my video share on my main PC, I double clicked a likely looking .AVI file which launched the Totem player, this displayed a message that it needed to look for a codec, I click Yes to install, clicked Next a couple of times and hey presto! It played back every video file I threw at it.
Adding Flash support was just as easy in FireFox as it is in Windows (you do get to choose between Adobe Flash and the GPL Gnash player, personally at the moment I'd say stick to Flash).
Adding extra programs is a doddle (as is to be expected these days) using the "Add / Remove Programs" option off the main menu.
All in all I'd say this is a mixed bag. Hardware support is good. The "Live" installer is much too bulky for what it does (350 meg memory needed just to run an installer? Oh come on!). The default desktop is good (but I still prefer KDE). Software installation and updates are as easy as you can get.
....
This was written a couple of days ago. I've stuck with Ubuntu on the Toshiba (but I've installed KDE4 as my main desktop) and I've got to say that I'm really enjoying using it.
I'm even tempted to install this on my main PC (replacing my three year old Slackware install). I'll have to see how well it handles BlitzMax before making the jump.
....
Four days later. . . .
So how well is Ubuntu standing up to regular use?
I've switched back from KDE4 to the default desktop as some of Ubuntu's features are better integrated into Gnome. Totem has remained as the media player of choice and so far has played everything that I have thrown at it.
FireFox has also impressed. Embedded video files (such as QuickTime) haven't caused any problems. More importantly YouTube videos play without any issues.
Some of the smaller touches have been really nice. For example, when trying to trace a network issue and trying to run "traceroute" from the command prompt, I received an error that the command wasn't installed, but was given full instructions on which package needed to be installed, and how to do so.
Monday 14 April 2008
Things that make you smile
Sometimes it is the smaller things in life that make you smile, such as receiving a batch of free Ubuntu install / live CDs from Canonical.
It still amazes me that a company is willing to send out free CDs (and to pay the postage themselves too). Not only that, but they've added in a batch of Ubuntu stickers this time too.
Neat!
I'll be having a play with Ubuntu 7.10 later on this week, and handing out free CDs to friends and colleagues too.
It still amazes me that a company is willing to send out free CDs (and to pay the postage themselves too). Not only that, but they've added in a batch of Ubuntu stickers this time too.
Neat!
I'll be having a play with Ubuntu 7.10 later on this week, and handing out free CDs to friends and colleagues too.
Net Neutrality is “A Load of Bollocks”
According to Neil Berkett, the new CEO of Virgin Media, “This net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks.” Mr Berkett followed this by stating that Virgin Media is already in negotiations with content providers (such as the BBC) to provide their media faster. For a fee, of course.
Those companies that refuse this commercial blackmail will find the "Information Superhighway" becomes the "Information Bus Lane."
Sometimes you wonder why CEOs are allowed to speak in public. The last time I saw this level of idiocy was from the then head of Ratners jewellery stores, Gerald Ratner. You may well be saying to yourself at this point, "Ratners? Who?"
Back in the 1980s Ratners sold "value" jewellery from high-street stores and were very successful. In fact, they had over 2,000 stores across the UK, and were making huge profits. The business was seen as one of the UK's great success stories.
That was until Gerald Ratner opened his mouth at an Institute of Directors (IoD) Conference in 1991.
So successful were they that Mr Ratner felt quite at ease describing what they sold as "crap."
"We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?" I say, because it's total crap."
He then went on to describe a set of 99p earrings that they sold as "cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn't last as long."
As this was said at a private function you could be forgiven for thinking (like Gerald did) that this would be taken as a private joke amongst like-minded individuals.
Unfortunately for him the press did get hold of his comments and he made front page news, as did the subsequent collapse of his business empire. More than £500million was wiped off the value of his companies as people stopped shopping there.
Within a short time the Ratners chain was no more. This form of commercial suicide is now known as "doing a Ratner."
You've got to hope that Neil hasn't just "done a Ratner" by underestimating peoples distaste with internet traffic shaping. After all, people are paying for a fast service for ALL content, not just for those companies that can afford to pay more.
If they want to do this form of content shaping they had better look at dropping the price of their products or else they could find, like Gerald did, that the end of the line could be closer than they might think.
Those companies that refuse this commercial blackmail will find the "Information Superhighway" becomes the "Information Bus Lane."
Sometimes you wonder why CEOs are allowed to speak in public. The last time I saw this level of idiocy was from the then head of Ratners jewellery stores, Gerald Ratner. You may well be saying to yourself at this point, "Ratners? Who?"
Back in the 1980s Ratners sold "value" jewellery from high-street stores and were very successful. In fact, they had over 2,000 stores across the UK, and were making huge profits. The business was seen as one of the UK's great success stories.
That was until Gerald Ratner opened his mouth at an Institute of Directors (IoD) Conference in 1991.
So successful were they that Mr Ratner felt quite at ease describing what they sold as "crap."
"We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?" I say, because it's total crap."
He then went on to describe a set of 99p earrings that they sold as "cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn't last as long."
As this was said at a private function you could be forgiven for thinking (like Gerald did) that this would be taken as a private joke amongst like-minded individuals.
Unfortunately for him the press did get hold of his comments and he made front page news, as did the subsequent collapse of his business empire. More than £500million was wiped off the value of his companies as people stopped shopping there.
Within a short time the Ratners chain was no more. This form of commercial suicide is now known as "doing a Ratner."
You've got to hope that Neil hasn't just "done a Ratner" by underestimating peoples distaste with internet traffic shaping. After all, people are paying for a fast service for ALL content, not just for those companies that can afford to pay more.
If they want to do this form of content shaping they had better look at dropping the price of their products or else they could find, like Gerald did, that the end of the line could be closer than they might think.
Sunday 13 April 2008
Weapon Brown - Blockhead's War
You may have heard of Jason Yungbluth. In the world of comics he is the definition of a twisted genius. Between his own self-published Deep Fried comics, web cartoons and work on Mad Magazine, not to mention his work for DC Comics he is certainly heading in the right direction to becoming a cartooning superstar.
So what has brought on this unsolicited outpouring of admiration towards Jason? Two words: Weapon Brown.
As parodies go, Weapon Brown is nothing short of amazing. A post-apocalyptic take on Charles M Schultz's creation that somehow manages to seamlessly blend an Akira / Mad Max style world with grown-up versions of the Peanuts gang.
You can get hold of the first collection of Weapon Brown stories from Jason's website. I did ages ago, and still find myself going back for another read.
So what is Blockhead's War going to bring to the table? Well, let's let the man himself explain:
Having exhausted all the possibilities of spoofing the inhabitants of the Peanuts comic strip, Blockhead's War pits Weapon Brown against parody versions of dozens of other comic strip stars, from Annie to Ziggy. New heights of infamy never before thought possible will be reached as one comic strip after another is mutated through the radiation of my my merciless wit. Only in Blockhead's War can you discover what hell Armageddon will wreck upon Dilbert, Cathy, Garfield and so many others!
Excited yet? How about reading it for free? Blockhead's War is currently being published in serial form via Jason's website every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Quiet in here, isn't it?
Regular readers (hello both of you) have probably been wondering why things have been so quiet here (and pretty silent on the Dan's Remakes site too).
Well, the curse of the hobbyist known as "Real Life" has been very much in evidence lately. After dealing with work and home, hobby stuff has had to take a very distant third place.
Well, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and after tomorrow things should be a bit more settled which should give me some time to get back into blogging, and programming too.
I'll also (hopefully) soon be back in the position where I have access to a Mac so I can compile some updates for MacOS X.
Well, the curse of the hobbyist known as "Real Life" has been very much in evidence lately. After dealing with work and home, hobby stuff has had to take a very distant third place.
Well, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and after tomorrow things should be a bit more settled which should give me some time to get back into blogging, and programming too.
I'll also (hopefully) soon be back in the position where I have access to a Mac so I can compile some updates for MacOS X.
Friday 4 April 2008
FreeSpire 2.0.8 - First Impressions
Regular readers may remember my quest to find the perfect GNU/Linux for my elderly HP OmniBook XE (40 gb hard drive, 156 meg RAM, running at a cracking 450mhz). I have tried a few different distros with varying levels of success - Green OS being the closest so far.
I've been playing with XP on the beast too - which worked surprisingly well on the limited hardware and memory.
Recently I went back to try a current version of Freespire, which like Green OS is based on Ubuntu. I've had limited success with Ubuntu itself, but strangely enough distros based on it seem to work well.
Freespire is no exception. I'd decided to set the laptop to dual boot between XP and Freespire in case everything went tits up. I'd given Freespire a dry run on an old Dell PC which I'd had lying around.
If you do a default install (and take over the entire disk) then the install is entirely painless, and slightly easier than installing Windows XP.
Setting up a dual boot on FreeSpire through was less straight forward. Choosing an "Advanced" install gave me a list of the current partitions, but no way to resize them. It recommended rebooting and choosing the third option to amend the partitions.
The third option turned out to be the graphical safe mode - nothing to do with resizing the disk. In the end I turned to an old Ubuntu CD and used that to resize the Windows XP partition. Returning to Freespire with 20 gig of free space I tried the advanced install again - even with free space on the drive there was no way of creating partitions.
Bugger.
Back into Ubuntu and I created a large main partition and smaller swap one. Returning to FreeSpire and this time I was able to select my new partition ready for the install. But wait, even though the partition was available and selected there was still no option to continue the install. Yes folks, we have hit the curse of the 800x600 screen resolution.
The "next" button was hidden off the bottom of the screen. Hitting "Tab" a couple of times then pressing "Enter" got me onto the next stage of the install and after that it was plain sailing. Right up to the point where I re-booted.
Grub came up, but no option for my Windows installation.
Aaaaaargh!
Luckily there was an option to redetect and after running that and rebooting again an option for Windows XP did appear.
But enough about the install. Once I had Freespire up and running it actually works rather well. My wireless card was detected and easily runs as well as it does on Windows XP. Connecting to my wireless network was a snap using the provided tools. The onboard sound card runs well, everything feels nice and snappy.
A real bonus is the CNR (Click 'n' Run) service. You don't need to register to run it (although it is free to do so if you wish), and installing additional software is as simple as choosing it from the list and clicking "Install". I've already added "The Gimp" and "Amarok" onto the laptop and I've got to say it was entirely painless.
Another "good thing" is that MP3s work from the outset. Flash is also pre-installed (so YouTube works out of the box). In fact, as far as multimedia goes Freespire is as good as it gets. All the codecs are legally licensed versions and I can safely say that this is a Linux distro that is squarely aimed at giving as good a user experience out of the box as you are likely to find.
Freespire looks good, is nippy enough to install on low-end hardware (P2 class and above) and feels like a modern operating system should.
Overall I've got to say that I've been pleasantly surprised at just how well it works. Yes, the install was a bit quirky (if you want to install alongside Windows that is) but once it is on the whole thing runs really well.
I'm going to stick with it for a while and see if it holds up to prolonged usage. But so far, so good!
Update (11/4/2008)
In the interests of fairness, I'm going to admit something. The install instructions were correct. If you boot into the "Live CD" environment then the partition manager is right there on the desktop.
D'oh!
I've stuck with FreeSpire for a couple of weeks now - and it really does work like a charm. In fact, I'm currently playing with an old Toshiba Satellite 4600, which also works really well with FreeSpire. High resolution graphics, decent performance, the built in wireless card also works out of the box too.
I've been playing with XP on the beast too - which worked surprisingly well on the limited hardware and memory.
Recently I went back to try a current version of Freespire, which like Green OS is based on Ubuntu. I've had limited success with Ubuntu itself, but strangely enough distros based on it seem to work well.
Freespire is no exception. I'd decided to set the laptop to dual boot between XP and Freespire in case everything went tits up. I'd given Freespire a dry run on an old Dell PC which I'd had lying around.
If you do a default install (and take over the entire disk) then the install is entirely painless, and slightly easier than installing Windows XP.
Setting up a dual boot on FreeSpire through was less straight forward. Choosing an "Advanced" install gave me a list of the current partitions, but no way to resize them. It recommended rebooting and choosing the third option to amend the partitions.
The third option turned out to be the graphical safe mode - nothing to do with resizing the disk. In the end I turned to an old Ubuntu CD and used that to resize the Windows XP partition. Returning to Freespire with 20 gig of free space I tried the advanced install again - even with free space on the drive there was no way of creating partitions.
Bugger.
Back into Ubuntu and I created a large main partition and smaller swap one. Returning to FreeSpire and this time I was able to select my new partition ready for the install. But wait, even though the partition was available and selected there was still no option to continue the install. Yes folks, we have hit the curse of the 800x600 screen resolution.
The "next" button was hidden off the bottom of the screen. Hitting "Tab" a couple of times then pressing "Enter" got me onto the next stage of the install and after that it was plain sailing. Right up to the point where I re-booted.
Grub came up, but no option for my Windows installation.
Aaaaaargh!
Luckily there was an option to redetect and after running that and rebooting again an option for Windows XP did appear.
But enough about the install. Once I had Freespire up and running it actually works rather well. My wireless card was detected and easily runs as well as it does on Windows XP. Connecting to my wireless network was a snap using the provided tools. The onboard sound card runs well, everything feels nice and snappy.
A real bonus is the CNR (Click 'n' Run) service. You don't need to register to run it (although it is free to do so if you wish), and installing additional software is as simple as choosing it from the list and clicking "Install". I've already added "The Gimp" and "Amarok" onto the laptop and I've got to say it was entirely painless.
Another "good thing" is that MP3s work from the outset. Flash is also pre-installed (so YouTube works out of the box). In fact, as far as multimedia goes Freespire is as good as it gets. All the codecs are legally licensed versions and I can safely say that this is a Linux distro that is squarely aimed at giving as good a user experience out of the box as you are likely to find.
Freespire looks good, is nippy enough to install on low-end hardware (P2 class and above) and feels like a modern operating system should.
Overall I've got to say that I've been pleasantly surprised at just how well it works. Yes, the install was a bit quirky (if you want to install alongside Windows that is) but once it is on the whole thing runs really well.
I'm going to stick with it for a while and see if it holds up to prolonged usage. But so far, so good!
Update (11/4/2008)
In the interests of fairness, I'm going to admit something. The install instructions were correct. If you boot into the "Live CD" environment then the partition manager is right there on the desktop.
D'oh!
I've stuck with FreeSpire for a couple of weeks now - and it really does work like a charm. In fact, I'm currently playing with an old Toshiba Satellite 4600, which also works really well with FreeSpire. High resolution graphics, decent performance, the built in wireless card also works out of the box too.
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