redelijkheid.com

Ever since I went ‘Apple’, the urge of moving away from Microsoft Windows operating systems is getting bigger and bigger. A couple of weeks ago I installed a two Ubuntu servers (v7.x) at work. Mainly for testing , and educational purposes.
The installation went extremely smooth on old Compaq ML370 server hardware. So, as a test I tried to install Adobe Coldfusion MX (Coldfusion 8 ) on the Ubuntu server (with Apache, and MySQL).

There are several postings on the Internet suggesting that it should be possible. Even though Ubuntu isn’t on the supported platforms list for Adobe Coldfusion MX.

(more…)

As of yesterday, the latest Ubuntu release ‘Hardy Heron‘ is available for download (both client and server). Every time a major Linux distri(bution) hits ‘the shelves’, the Linux community roars. With each release (Ubuntu or whatever flavor) the Linux community gets closer, and closer to Windows.

Even though the OS itself is getting better and better. It still lacks the support of decent major software like Adobe Creative Suite, etc. It’s missing the software people use in every day (business)life.
Sure, there a million different ways of running Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop on a Linux OS, but these require a commercial piece of software (CrossOver) , or in depth knowledge of the OS to make it work (Wine in some cases). Two things that shouldn’t be required. Not if you’re used to Windows (or Apple’s OSX). And even if you find a ’substitute’ it’s most likely to have an awful user experience.

The average housewife won’t use Linux, because her friends all use Windows. All those nice little Windows programs, which makes life easier (or a living hell with all the mal/spyware out there). So if the Linux community wants to make a difference they need to create some sort of critical mass (by their selves, or by Microsoft screwing up) to get the attention of the ‘normal’ user. But in a community where there’s no real (commercial) business model, it’s gonna be damn hard.

Microsoft created this critical mass by playing (probably) the best marketing trick in the world; Release Windows 95, and turn a blind eye to those who use a pirated copy at home. The home users create demand on the workfloor, so businesses start to use it on their workstations. Soon everyone was addicted. And now it’s damn hard to beat the addiction.

B.t.w., Apple is doing it a lot better. They created a nice and stable OS (just like the average Linux desktop distribution), BUT the OS has ALL the relevant drivers for the hardware used. ALSO they have a complete (and cheap) software suite (iLife and iWork), which is more than enough for the average family. No need to search the caverns of the Internet for software, and they look and feel the same as the OS.

So, I guess that my conclusion is that the OS is nearing perfection, but it (Linux in general) lacks good and decent third party software (and a good marketing machine )

In the mean time; I’m gonna upgrade my Linux (mail, web, and ssh) servers at work to ‘Hardy Heron’.

Well, that was another morning well spent….

A couple off weeks ago I started experimenting with FreeRADIUS on Ubuntu server (v6.06.2 TLS). Mainly because I needed to test some things for work. So I used VMWare to experiment. The networking part was set-up as Bridged.

Today, I wanted to test with iperf (a tool for network performance testing). So I launched the virtual machine, but there was no network connectivity. ifconfig showed that eth1 didn’t received an IP adres.
So I ran every possible test there was;

• restarted the interfaces (/etc/init.d/networking restart)

This resulted in the following;

Listening on LPF/eth1/00:0c:29:68:e3:eb
Sending on LPF/eth1/00:0c:29:68:e3:eb
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 8
DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 12

The “DHCPDISCOVER” messages continue about 4 times, then the message:

No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.

• restarted the DHCP server
• rebooted the virtual machine
• changes the networking to NAT instead of Bridged (this way, connectivity was restored, but not the way I wanted. I needed Bridge-mode)
• Tried to run the virtual machine on OSX (VMWare Fusion), which worked surprisingly.

After this I ran Wireshark on my server to see if DHCP request were coming in…. And you might have guessed; No DHCP request were reaching the DHCP server. So the problem was work PC related…. As a matter of fact, I had the Cisco VPN client running….. Which didn’t allow the DHCP request broadcast.

Shutting the VPN client down solved the DHCP problem. After the virtual machine worked I could reinitiate the VPN.

Mental note to myself: do NOT boot/restart the virtual machines when the VPN is up.

There are lot’s of people who complain about the updates on the Windows platform, but Apple tries to compete I guess. In the last 3 days there was a big security update, Safari 3.1 (both Windows and OSX), Time machine and Airport Updates, and now a Camera RAW update for OSX 10.5.2.

Thankfully no problems on my side with the updates.

Looking for other updates from Apple? Just go here.

The default background image on OSX Leopard is this annoying Aurora/starfield kinda picture. To change this, just change the desktop background image by using the rightmouse button on the desktop.It’s something different to change the background image on the login screen. Some searching revealed that it uses the DefaultDesktop.jpg in the /System/Library/CoreServices/ directory. ‘Just’ replace that file with your own picture. There is a small catch. If you replace it, it will get the wrong permissions on the file, and therefor won’t show up on the login screen.Just ‘reset’ the permissions on the file like this:

• sudo chown root /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg
• sudo chmod 755 /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg

You may need to enter a username and password while executing these commands.

The new Finder in Leopard has this neat feature that shows your documents (and other stuff) that have been accessed ‘Yesterday‘, ‘Today‘, and ‘Past Week‘. Very handy. Downside is that it shows not only the documents, but also every other file that has been changed. So a nice short list of documents is out of the question. After a day of workin, you might end up with a very, very long list of files.

The ‘Search For‘ is a nice way of exploring the crap on your machine after an upgrade of Tiger. Do an upgrade and use the ‘Search For‘ feature the next day. I found some files that I didn’t even knew I had. Most of them were mail related (kinda embarrassing attachments etc.).

Oh, and if you’re a person that wants to hide certain things on the computer, you might wanna disable spotlight (or whatever function is doing this), because it’s one hell of a Parental Control mechanism. Even the items you used in the preference panel show up.

B.t.w. Did I mention that the new Cover Flow feature in Finder just kicks ass. It runs as smooth as a baby’s bottom… well you get the idea.

It’s been a long night, but I finally installed Leopard. The reason it took so long is that I didn’t have a retail DVD of the the OS. I had to screw around with a diskimage. From the moment I successfully burned the DVD it took about half an hour to 40 minutes to upgrade Tiger to Leopard.

Here are my experiences:

• First time booting into the desktop takes forever. I guess that spotlight is to blame for this, but I’m not sure.
• Eventhough I had correctly configured network interfaces, the network assistant thingy popped up, and kept bothering me (even after reboots).
  Removing it from the ‘login items’ stopped it.
• My Mail (all account were configured as IMAP) was unable to retrieve new e-mails from all accounts. After some poking around I deleted all accounts and mail settings. After recreating the accounts everything worked fine. This is the nice thing about IMAP. You can remove your account and settings, and you won’t lose your mail, because it remains on the server.
• Adobe Lightroom seems to work, and so do all of my other image manipulation tools.
• PGP v9.6.x crashes. I had to remove it by hand. Too bad that there isn’t a documented manual uninstall procedure. Guess I have to wait for an update. Just uninstall the app before upgrading.

Initial impressions:

• Faster than Tiger
• Very backwards compatible. Vista eat you heart out.
• The app improvements on Finder, and the Dock are great. Especially the coverflow view in Finder kicks ass, and runs great on my ‘old’ MacBook Pro.
• …..

Well, nothing is as easy as it may seem. As I mentioned earlier, I downloaded a copy of Leopard to see if it’s worth buying. This download was a so-called .dmg file. This file can be burned to a double layer DVD by the Disk Utility or by using Toast.

The problem is that my MacBook Pro doesn’t have a dual layer DVD burner, so I need to burn this one with my external USB NEC burner (which supports burning dual layer DVD’s). For some weird reason it (my MacBook Pro) refuses to burn anything dual layer. So in the mean time I’m searching for another version of Leopard (preferably an ISO-file), and I’m using Super Duper! to backup my MBP. Both are taking ’some’ time, so I don’t think that I’ll be upgrading this weekend .

UPDATE: Oke, I found a PDF from Adobe stating that Adobe Lightroom isn’t fully compatible yet. So, no upgrade for me. Guess I can stop trying to get the downloaded DMG to work. Well, at least I didn’t spend my Sunday on nothing. I figured out how to convert a DMG to ISO.

If you have lived under a rock, you might have missed the news about the release of Leopard. No, not the animal, but the latest and newest release of Apple OSX 10.5. As usual, the final release is leaked onto the Internet before it hits the shelves.
This gives me time to try the release before actually buying it. Don’t worry, I will buy Leopard. I’ll get it with a new iMac, a new MacBook Pro, or I’ll buy the shrink wrapped version. The question is, should I buy it immediately?

I use some apps that might not work with Leopard. So first, I’ll Super Dupe my hard drive, so if things go wrong I can go back. After that I’ll try to upgrade and see if all apps still work. If not, I still have a way of getting back to Tiger (10.4.x). I guess I found a way to spend my weekend.

Oops.. getting back the the old OS, might be a reinstall. Super Duper isn’t fully tested on Leopard;

Leopard Infomation

SuperDuper! 2.1.4 is not yet fully Leopard compatible.

I’m still in the process of migrating from Windows to OSX. During this process I run into the most annoying things. The latest annoyance is the way different operating systems access (read AND write) files on volumes (internal, external, network etc.).

Windows uses the well-known driveletters (C:, D:,) for local resources, and \\<servername\ networked resources while Apple uses so-called volumes for both. If you try to use a Windows file reference on a Mac, you’re out of luck. This is also true the other way around.

The reason for this ‘rant’ is that I use photo catalog / manipulation software on both Windows and OSX. At first, I used different programs on the platforms. This became a problem when I added photos to product X on OSX. When I needed to some work on the Windows machine, I had to add the photo again to product Y on the Windows machine. This results into two different libraries with almost the same content.

After some searching I found iView Media Pro (which unfortunately has been acquired by Microsoft). This piece of software is used for cataloging different kinds of media, AND the same software is available on both platforms.
Unfortunately, even though the media catalogs could be read on both platforms (the catalog holds the thumbnail and other metadata about the original), the reference to the actual media is platform dependent. So the metadata was showing up, but the actual file could not be read on the other platform.
The same problem occurs with Adobe Lightroom. Available on both platforms, but the catalogs can’t be exchanged.

Why is it so hard to have a product which is available on multiple platforms, and uses some sort of database to be able to exchange data between them? Am I the only one running into to this?

Network storage is getting cheaper and cheaper. More people are using network storage to have their content online without have the need of a dedicated (workgroup or enterprise) server. These appliances are accessible through smb, cifs, webdav, etc. Every OS can access the content, but every OS/application uses a different markup.

Standardization has a long way to go…..

Apple announced that the OSX 10.5 (aka Leopard) will be delayed till October 2007….

… We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October…..

Aaaaargh. I was hoping to get it in June.

Well, this gives me more time for saving a little extra money, and buy a new piece of Apple hardware (Mac Mini or perhaps even a Mac Pro) which will have Leopard pre-installed. Or maybe just the iPhone when it arrives in Europe at the end of the year and a separate copy of Leopard.

It’s been a couple of days since the release of the Apple TV. Directly after its release it became clear that the device runs on a minimal version of OSX. It didn’t take long for enthusiasts to open the Apple TV box, and add extra functionality (like SSH, DivX, XviD, etc). Even adding a much bigger harddrive is quite possible.
These ‘hacks’ can be found on AppleTVHacks.net.

Today, a new hack surfaced. It seems that Apple implemented some sort of limitation on running a full blown version of OSX… Well, that limitation didn’t last very long. There’s a short tutorial about running OSX on the Apple TV (including support for keyboard and mouse). This makes the Apple TV the cheapest Apple PC available (299 euros).
You do need additional hardware to make this work (like special screwdrivers, an Intel Mac, some extra peripherals, etc.)

Apple has update their public beta of Boot Camp with support for the 32bit edition of Microsoft Windows Vista. This ‘proves’ that the rumors about the possible delay of Leopard due to lack of Vista support are not true.

Boot Camp 1.2 beta includes:

• Support for Windows Vista (32-bit)
• Updated drivers, including but not limited to trackpad, AppleTime (synch), audio, graphics, modem, iSight camera
• Support the Apple Remote (works with iTunes and Windows Media Player)
• A Windows system tray icon for easy access to Boot Camp information and actions
• …..

So a release of Leopard in Spring 2007 is still possible

Microsoft released Service Pack 2 for Windows 2003 this week. Normally, the release will be announced, but this time they released it quietly (??).

Anyway, I tried to upgrade my experimental Windows 2003 SP1 server with SP2, but that was a no-go. It seems that if yo uninstalled Internet Explorer 7 AFTER you installed sp1, you need to uninstall IE7 (according to the release notes).

Internet Explorer
If you installed Internet Explorer 7 after installing Windows Server 2003 SP1, you must uninstall Internet Explorer 7 before you install Windows Server 2003 SP2.

After this you can install Service Pack 2. This means 2 reboots instead of 1 (are we going back to the old days where you needed a reboot every time you sneezed??)

First of all, I didn’t want IE7, but it got pushed down my throat in their so-called ‘critical updates’. And second, this confirms the lack of inter-department communication in Redmond, otherwise this wouldn’t be necessary….

And the fun continues…. After uninstalling IE7 I received an ‘Access Denied’ error while updating. Research on that error gave me some pages relating to Windows XP service pack installations. It seems that there might be some registry keys which are not modify-able by the installation of SP2.
For godsake, I run the update under the administrator account. Why can’t the installer modify the registry setting for me? Why do I have to screw around with the registry editor and logfiles to install a freakin’ service pack from Microsoft ?

The Windows box goes out the window, as soon I have enough money to get me a OSX based server….

UPDATE: The update via Windows Update also didn’t work. It didn’t show the Access Denied error, but it wouldn’t install SP2. I did get it to work though by ‘resetting’ the permissions on the registry with the following command:

secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\repair\secsetup.inf /db secsetup.sdb /verbose

Rumors are that Apple OSX Leopard might be shipping as early as March this year. The same goes for the new iLife ‘07, and iWork ‘07.

I can’t wait to get my hands on Leopard, and iWork ‘07. iWorkr is rumored to have a spreadsheet-like program called Numbers. Finally an ‘alternative’ for Microsoft Excel. iWork’s Numbers will probably still be overkill, but it beats the rosetta version of Microsoft with the gazillion features and tools I never seem to use.

No idea what iLife ‘07 will bring (haven’t had the urge to find out, since ‘06 still works fine). I guess I’ll download a trail , and decide then if I really need it.

Leopard and iWork will definitely be purchased by me (if it has the spreadsheet program).