It's normally about a month before the release date. So no, last November is probably not recently enough, sorry. I bought my new ibook in March and that's probably not recently enough either.
I'll look around for someplace saying it definitively. Obviously USB 1.1 isn't fast enough to run a whole OS off of, but I'm saying it's technically possible to boot a mac to it.
I don't think Macs can boot off of USB 2.0. That would be one reason.
That's not correct - I know that modern macs can boot off of USB devices. My new ibook certainly does. Someone has told me that any mac newer than a "Yikes" G4 (which used the old G3 motherboard) ought to be able to as well. I haven't verified that, however.
I don't think that's right. I've got one of those Ximeta thingies, and it just does some USB-over-ethernet trick (I assume) to be attached to any machine. I hear there is multi-write support (for windows only of course) now, perhaps that requires a machine to be the "master" host.
Rsyncing to a mounted drive is very useful, and a good way to do things on machines that are nearby. What about remote co-lo machines, though? I've been puzzling trying to find a method to do incremental backups (i.e. NOT dumping the whole system once a week/month) of a co-located system across the net. I need to preserve permissions and ownerships, and as I said, it must be incremental (using rsyinc this should be easy, at least). The hard part, though, is doing it securely. NFS mounts... are not very secure at all. Especially way across the internet. Going over ssh is good, but how do you automate it? In order to preserve permissions, rsync needs to run as root on both ends. Ssh keys are one way to do this; but in order to have full automation, you have to have a passwordless ssh-key that grants root access on some machine, and that freaks me out. What else can you do? I suppose I could run the script by hand and put in passphrases and such, but I _will_ forget to do that on a regular basis. There's got to be some sort of solution to this!
*shrug* I tend to disagree. I do most of my work on a 450mhz G4 with a radeon 8500, and it runs pretty nicely. A few things suck - for instance obnoxious Flash stuff doesn't always run at full speed - but other than that, I'd *MUCH* prefer this machine to any PC under 1.8ghz or so. I imagine MacOS 10.4 will change things a bit with its new graphics features, but I don't think it is going to slow down any existing machines. The current version of OSX runs pretty well (imho) with any video card that supports Quartz Extreme.
Oh, crazy. I hadn't heard about that plan from Ari, though I have been poking at him about still using Potato for a while now. I guess I stand corrected.
Sourceforge's mirror system is run on all sorts of different stuff. The individual mirror sites are not run by SF, but by whatever site hosts them. Further, most of the rest of SourceForge runs on Debian. (this post is not an attack on FC in any way, just a statement of fact)
If you totally can't stand NFS, you *might* want to give OpenAFS a try. It's probably total overkill, but is is really neat, and once you get an AFS cell up and running it is very good. It just takes a lot of work when you first start out of the gate. I did it for these guys, and we wrote a bunchofdocumentation, and about a year later, things are really good. AFS rocks.
to use the camera function and not get billed for data transfer
Another minor (or major, depending on perspective) point - tmobile's data plans are unlimited data so it doesn't matter. Ringtones, voice memos, etc - they all come over the internet. (or via the usb cable - which is where bluetooth would come in)
I agree that there are some very cool features that could come along with bluetooth. Proximity screen locking sounds really cool. Surfing via powerbook via bt cellphone also sounds cool, albeit very slow over gprs. You're well within your rights to not want one until it has bluetooth support. What I'm saying is that bluetooth is not an absolutely critical feature to me, and I think that the hiptop is a useful device even without it.
Sorry, but I think you don't get it. I have had a hiptop for 1.5 years now, and I really like it. This _IS_ the most functional pda/cell device out there. Perhaps bluetooth would be nice, but I don't really care - it would be of no use for syncing, because the device is already connected to the internet. You will sync with danger's servers, not with your device.
Sync is finally coming. This is one hundred percent T-Mobile's fault, not Danger's. There have been several sync solutions ready to ship for quite some time now. The only holdup is T-Mobile.
Last I heard, the new hiptops have triband GSM. Is that not standard enough?
As for the storage slot, all I can think of to do with it (that would be actually useful in any capacity) would be to store mp3s, which I don't care about. I have an ipod for that.
The camera? I truly couldn't care less. Maybe the new hiptop will have a usable camera. If so, great... Whatever.
The hiptop has a very very good user interface, it has a very good OS (I am slightly biased because I know some of the people who wrote it). It sets out to do certain things, and it does them very well.
You are right: it is not about how hip it is, it is about how functional it is. Danger makes it extremely functional, and T-Mobile is annoyingly pushing it as a hip toy for teenagers. To me (and the dozen or so other users in my nerd-universe), it is a highly useful tool in our daily lives. You don't realise how useful it is to have an always-on internet link on your cellphone until you get it. It becomes hard to live without.
Cognet is precisely what you want. It makes for a great IRC client for my hiptop, and many of my hiptop-using friends use it as well. It requires a backend (written in Python) on a unix machine somewhere on the net to make it useful.
Cognet is *far* more useful than trying to deal with ssh connections from the hiptop. Give it a try.
You're free to have a low opinion of Solaris, but you really should be more informed about it first. I'm not trolling or flaming, just hear me out before you mod me down.
Lacking GNU stuff in the default install may be a killer for you, but it really depends on your perspective. That is changing, anyway - solaris 9 has assorted gnu stuff included in/usr/sfw (if you install it), and I'm sure solaris 10 will have more. I really don't find it to be that big of a deal, because at my site I end up custom-building so much stuff anyway that it hardly matters.
I have no idea what you mean about commandline editing. Solaris comes with bash, and I bet that's what you use elsewhere.
The package format is old, and it will remain that way. It works the same now as it did ten years ago, and for many people that is a Good Thing. Anyhow, you don't need to make your own SysV packages. Make use of something like Encap to manage your/usr/local tree and keep your site-local packages away from the system package manager.
Patching isn't as hard as you make it out to be either. You could just wget ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/9_Recommended.z ip and run the install script in there to pick up any security fixes. Personally, I use a cron job to download that once a day, and then I run Superglue, which is just a shell script, to figure out which patches I need and install them out of an nfs share. It's simple, it works. Note that I don't cron the installation of packages, just downloading them. Cronned patch installation makes me nervous.
The installer sucks. Oh btw, DO NOT use the "install" cd. Boot "disc 1" and throw away the install disc. Seriously. Also, you really should not be using the installer if you have more than one or two systems. Set up a Jumpstart and net-install your machines. It really isn't difficult. One again, simple enough and it works.
Your ultra5 sucks, sorry to say it. Those were just lame machines. There is a reason they cost like $90 now: they suck. They can be made more useful with the addition of a $40 scsi card from ebay; that onboard cmd640 ide controller is godawful. Fwiw, I had an ultra5/360 with 256mb of ram and a pair of scsi drives (no goddamn IDE) withstand a full force slashdotting with ease. If you want a cheap sun machine that sucks less, find yourself an ultra2 2x300 with creator3d. Dual cpu, lots of ram slots that take normal sun ram, scsi storage. Should run you $300 or less. Sbus cards are cheap nowadays, too.
Solaris does support 24bit color depth on that machine; you just have to set it using fbconfig. I have no clue why they don't support 16bpp, and you're right, it is retarded.
And yeah, CDE sucks. Install Gnome. It comes with solaris 9 and it will be the default desktop in solaris 10.
Finally... I just don't bother using solaris as a desktop system. Almost all the workstations I run are Linux or MacOS. But damn, Solaris makes a good server OS.
Yeah... except for THIS soda machine (which just so happens to be in the seibel center) The link points at the web server running inside the pop machine itself. The only photo I can find of the thing is here, with one of the guys who worked on it sitting in front of it. And a BeBox perched on top.
You're not the first person to think that. At MacHack last year, one of the Apple guys on the iPod development team actually implemented that for the notes reader (I can't remember the guy's name, sadly. He was the guy who wrote the notes reader app)
No kidding. I saw this release and I was like "You've got to be fucking kidding me." I upgraded my colo server to 2.4.23 TWO DAYS AGO when I was in Chicago. It's a good thing I was onsite for it, too, because it wouldn't have rebooted all by itself.
It is because of this sort of thing that I am 'upgrading' to a Sun machine running Solaris. Not because Solaris never needs kernel patches, but because Suns are more likely to actually COME BACK UP when you reboot them remotely. Some errors you WILL NOT SEE ON A SUN:
KEYBOARD ERROR PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE
FLOPPY DRIVE A: ERROR PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE
CMOS CHECKSUM INVALID RUN BIOS SETUP PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE
etc. I will be a HAPPY CAMPER when I don't have to worry about that sort of crap anymore.
I debated between buying (used) a Sun Ultra2 (2x300mhz UltraSparc II) and an IBM RS6000 7013-43p/140 (233mhz 604e), because I like AIX as much as I like Solaris. I even considered getting an SGI Origin200 (2x180mhz R10k), but punted on that one because IRIX is a pain in the ass. I ended up buying an Ultra2 last night for $260 because AIX 5.2 can't run on 43p/140's for some arbitrary reason. The Ultra2 will remain supported for a good long while. AND IT WILL HAVE MIRRORED SYSTEM DRIVES. That will be nice.
Dude. *DO NOT* use patchpro. It is a complete piece of shit! Instead, do one of two things:
A) periodically download "rec+sec" patch bundles from sunsolve.sun.com and install them
B) Or, do what I do and run your own superglue patch server. This is just an nfs share with the patch collection unzipped into it, along with a cron job that updates it once a day on the server. Truely trivial to manage.
Info on superglue (written about my particular superglue installation, which you can use if you want, but I wouldn't trust some random dude to distribute OS patches!): http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/wiki/space/Superglue
To get the superglue script, read through that page, mount my nfs share, and get the superglue script. It's just a shell script. It is installed as an encap package (encap.org), so you can copy that and install it yourself.
Hah. I watched that video - the bet was apparrently that he could not hold a tablespoon of some Extremely Hot Sauce in his mouth for two minutes without swallowing or barfing. Needless to say, he managed to do it. In style, I might add. Even went for Bonus Seconds. It looked like he got $100 cash out of the bet, too. That may have been how much the drive cost, though - I duno.
I'm having to reboot back to 2.4 for the Cisco vpn driver,
There's a solution to that if you're using the Cisco VPN3000 client: this mailing list posting by a friend of mine explains how to make it work.
Re:Upgrade to a modern distribution like debian
on
Post Cobalt Alternatives?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Theoretically it is possible to use recent Linux 2.4 kernels on Cobalt MIPS machines. I did manage to get 2.4.18 or so to boot on a Qube2 (very similar to the raq2), but I did not get Debian installed on it. It should be possible, though. I later managed to get NetBSD to work on it as well.
I run a lab with about 50 macs (assorted models, from 350mhz iMacs through 800mhz eMacs, and a few 1ghz G4's) - I spent a good bit of time on a solution, and it's really not as hard as this thread makes it sound.
First, I build one system and set it up *Exactly* the way I want all the others to be. I have some run-once script voodoo to set the IP address of each machine based on its Mac address, and to munge some ByHost user preferences for the built-in guest account. Then, I use Carbon Copy Cloner">Carbon Copy Cloner to create an image of that machine's hard drive.
Once I have an image of the machine, I use NetRestoreNetRestore (by the same guy as CCC) to create a netboot image that will automatically install the master machine's HD image onto each client.
I am fortunate to have a MacOS X Server machine on which to run the NetBoot server - which is independent of the subnet's master DHCP server, I might add - but it is possible to netboot macs from other Unix machines with a bit of patching to dhcpd.
Anyhow, all in all I don't find it any more difficult to netinstall Macs than it is to do the same for Windows machines. Building the master clone image is time consuming and annoying, but it always will be for any platform.
Feel free to email me if you are interested in my machine setup voodoo script. I had to borrow some binaries from OS X Server in order to make it work. It's slowly turning into something useful as I add more functionality to it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's normally about a month before the release date. So no, last November is probably not recently enough, sorry. I bought my new ibook in March and that's probably not recently enough either.
I'll look around for someplace saying it definitively. Obviously USB 1.1 isn't fast enough to run a whole OS off of, but I'm saying it's technically possible to boot a mac to it.
I don't think Macs can boot off of USB 2.0. That would be one reason.
That's not correct - I know that modern macs can boot off of USB devices. My new ibook certainly does. Someone has told me that any mac newer than a "Yikes" G4 (which used the old G3 motherboard) ought to be able to as well. I haven't verified that, however.
http://cm.math.uiuc.edu/~staffin/1984macintro.mov
also,
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/~staffin/1984macintro.mov
I don't think that's right. I've got one of those Ximeta thingies, and it just does some USB-over-ethernet trick (I assume) to be attached to any machine. I hear there is multi-write support (for windows only of course) now, perhaps that requires a machine to be the "master" host.
Rsyncing to a mounted drive is very useful, and a good way to do things on machines that are nearby. What about remote co-lo machines, though? I've been puzzling trying to find a method to do incremental backups (i.e. NOT dumping the whole system once a week/month) of a co-located system across the net. I need to preserve permissions and ownerships, and as I said, it must be incremental (using rsyinc this should be easy, at least). The hard part, though, is doing it securely. NFS mounts ... are not very secure at all. Especially way across the internet. Going over ssh is good, but how do you automate it? In order to preserve permissions, rsync needs to run as root on both ends. Ssh keys are one way to do this; but in order to have full automation, you have to have a passwordless ssh-key that grants root access on some machine, and that freaks me out. What else can you do? I suppose I could run the script by hand and put in passphrases and such, but I _will_ forget to do that on a regular basis. There's got to be some sort of solution to this!
*shrug* I tend to disagree. I do most of my work on a 450mhz G4 with a radeon 8500, and it runs pretty nicely. A few things suck - for instance obnoxious Flash stuff doesn't always run at full speed - but other than that, I'd *MUCH* prefer this machine to any PC under 1.8ghz or so. I imagine MacOS 10.4 will change things a bit with its new graphics features, but I don't think it is going to slow down any existing machines. The current version of OSX runs pretty well (imho) with any video card that supports Quartz Extreme.
Oh, crazy. I hadn't heard about that plan from Ari, though I have been poking at him about still using Potato for a while now. I guess I stand corrected.
Sourceforge's mirror system is run on all sorts of different stuff. The individual mirror sites are not run by SF, but by whatever site hosts them. Further, most of the rest of SourceForge runs on Debian. (this post is not an attack on FC in any way, just a statement of fact)
If you totally can't stand NFS, you *might* want to give OpenAFS a try. It's probably total overkill, but is is really neat, and once you get an AFS cell up and running it is very good. It just takes a lot of work when you first start out of the gate. I did it for these guys, and we wrote a bunch of documentation, and about a year later, things are really good. AFS rocks.
to use the camera function and not get billed for data transfer
Another minor (or major, depending on perspective) point - tmobile's data plans are unlimited data so it doesn't matter. Ringtones, voice memos, etc - they all come over the internet. (or via the usb cable - which is where bluetooth would come in)
I agree that there are some very cool features that could come along with bluetooth. Proximity screen locking sounds really cool. Surfing via powerbook via bt cellphone also sounds cool, albeit very slow over gprs. You're well within your rights to not want one until it has bluetooth support. What I'm saying is that bluetooth is not an absolutely critical feature to me, and I think that the hiptop is a useful device even without it.
Sorry, but I think you don't get it. I have had a hiptop for 1.5 years now, and I really like it. This _IS_ the most functional pda/cell device out there. Perhaps bluetooth would be nice, but I don't really care - it would be of no use for syncing, because the device is already connected to the internet. You will sync with danger's servers, not with your device.
Sync is finally coming. This is one hundred percent T-Mobile's fault, not Danger's. There have been several sync solutions ready to ship for quite some time now. The only holdup is T-Mobile.
Last I heard, the new hiptops have triband GSM. Is that not standard enough?
As for the storage slot, all I can think of to do with it (that would be actually useful in any capacity) would be to store mp3s, which I don't care about. I have an ipod for that.
The camera? I truly couldn't care less. Maybe the new hiptop will have a usable camera. If so, great... Whatever.
The hiptop has a very very good user interface, it has a very good OS (I am slightly biased because I know some of the people who wrote it). It sets out to do certain things, and it does them very well.
You are right: it is not about how hip it is, it is about how functional it is. Danger makes it extremely functional, and T-Mobile is annoyingly pushing it as a hip toy for teenagers. To me (and the dozen or so other users in my nerd-universe), it is a highly useful tool in our daily lives. You don't realise how useful it is to have an always-on internet link on your cellphone until you get it. It becomes hard to live without.
AMD64 support is going to debut with Solaris 10. I imagine it will be out in a few months.
Cognet is precisely what you want. It makes for a great IRC client for my hiptop, and many of my hiptop-using friends use it as well. It requires a backend (written in Python) on a unix machine somewhere on the net to make it useful.
Cognet is *far* more useful than trying to deal with ssh connections from the hiptop. Give it a try.
And I believe it was an SGI Crimson (with RealityEngine, of course), and not a Cray.
You're free to have a low opinion of Solaris, but you really should be more informed about it first. I'm not trolling or flaming, just hear me out before you mod me down.
Lacking GNU stuff in the default install may be a killer for you, but it really depends on your perspective. That is changing, anyway - solaris 9 has assorted gnu stuff included in /usr/sfw (if you install it), and I'm sure solaris 10 will have more. I really don't find it to be that big of a deal, because at my site I end up custom-building so much stuff anyway that it hardly matters.
I have no idea what you mean about commandline editing. Solaris comes with bash, and I bet that's what you use elsewhere.
The package format is old, and it will remain that way. It works the same now as it did ten years ago, and for many people that is a Good Thing. Anyhow, you don't need to make your own SysV packages. Make use of something like Encap to manage your /usr/local tree and keep your site-local packages away from the system package manager.
Patching isn't as hard as you make it out to be either. You could just wget ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/9_Recommended.z ip and run the install script in there to pick up any security fixes. Personally, I use a cron job to download that once a day, and then I run Superglue, which is just a shell script, to figure out which patches I need and install them out of an nfs share. It's simple, it works. Note that I don't cron the installation of packages, just downloading them. Cronned patch installation makes me nervous.
The installer sucks. Oh btw, DO NOT use the "install" cd. Boot "disc 1" and throw away the install disc. Seriously. Also, you really should not be using the installer if you have more than one or two systems. Set up a Jumpstart and net-install your machines. It really isn't difficult. One again, simple enough and it works.
Your ultra5 sucks, sorry to say it. Those were just lame machines. There is a reason they cost like $90 now: they suck. They can be made more useful with the addition of a $40 scsi card from ebay; that onboard cmd640 ide controller is godawful. Fwiw, I had an ultra5/360 with 256mb of ram and a pair of scsi drives (no goddamn IDE) withstand a full force slashdotting with ease. If you want a cheap sun machine that sucks less, find yourself an ultra2 2x300 with creator3d. Dual cpu, lots of ram slots that take normal sun ram, scsi storage. Should run you $300 or less. Sbus cards are cheap nowadays, too.
Solaris does support 24bit color depth on that machine; you just have to set it using fbconfig. I have no clue why they don't support 16bpp, and you're right, it is retarded.
And yeah, CDE sucks. Install Gnome. It comes with solaris 9 and it will be the default desktop in solaris 10.
Finally... I just don't bother using solaris as a desktop system. Almost all the workstations I run are Linux or MacOS. But damn, Solaris makes a good server OS.
Thanks, Don!
Yeah... except for THIS soda machine (which just so happens to be in the seibel center) The link points at the web server running inside the pop machine itself. The only photo I can find of the thing is here, with one of the guys who worked on it sitting in front of it. And a BeBox perched on top.
You're not the first person to think that. At MacHack last year, one of the Apple guys on the iPod development team actually implemented that for the notes reader (I can't remember the guy's name, sadly. He was the guy who wrote the notes reader app)
No kidding. I saw this release and I was like "You've got to be fucking kidding me." I upgraded my colo server to 2.4.23 TWO DAYS AGO when I was in Chicago. It's a good thing I was onsite for it, too, because it wouldn't have rebooted all by itself.
It is because of this sort of thing that I am 'upgrading' to a Sun machine running Solaris. Not because Solaris never needs kernel patches, but because Suns are more likely to actually COME BACK UP when you reboot them remotely. Some errors you WILL NOT SEE ON A SUN:
etc. I will be a HAPPY CAMPER when I don't have to worry about that sort of crap anymore.I debated between buying (used) a Sun Ultra2 (2x300mhz UltraSparc II) and an IBM RS6000 7013-43p/140 (233mhz 604e), because I like AIX as much as I like Solaris. I even considered getting an SGI Origin200 (2x180mhz R10k), but punted on that one because IRIX is a pain in the ass. I ended up buying an Ultra2 last night for $260 because AIX 5.2 can't run on 43p/140's for some arbitrary reason. The Ultra2 will remain supported for a good long while. AND IT WILL HAVE MIRRORED SYSTEM DRIVES. That will be nice.
Dude. *DO NOT* use patchpro. It is a complete piece of shit! Instead, do one of two things:
A) periodically download "rec+sec" patch bundles from sunsolve.sun.com and install them
B) Or, do what I do and run your own superglue patch server. This is just an nfs share with the patch collection unzipped into it, along with a cron job that updates it once a day on the server. Truely trivial to manage.
Info on superglue (written about my particular superglue installation, which you can use if you want, but I wouldn't trust some random dude to distribute OS patches!): http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/wiki/space/Superglue
To get the superglue script, read through that page, mount my nfs share, and get the superglue script. It's just a shell script. It is installed as an encap package (encap.org), so you can copy that and install it yourself.
Hah. I watched that video - the bet was apparrently that he could not hold a tablespoon of some Extremely Hot Sauce in his mouth for two minutes without swallowing or barfing. Needless to say, he managed to do it. In style, I might add. Even went for Bonus Seconds. It looked like he got $100 cash out of the bet, too. That may have been how much the drive cost, though - I duno.
There's a solution to that if you're using the Cisco VPN3000 client: this mailing list posting by a friend of mine explains how to make it work.
Theoretically it is possible to use recent Linux 2.4 kernels on Cobalt MIPS machines. I did manage to get 2.4.18 or so to boot on a Qube2 (very similar to the raq2), but I did not get Debian installed on it. It should be possible, though. I later managed to get NetBSD to work on it as well.
I run a lab with about 50 macs (assorted models, from 350mhz iMacs through 800mhz eMacs, and a few 1ghz G4's) - I spent a good bit of time on a solution, and it's really not as hard as this thread makes it sound.
First, I build one system and set it up *Exactly* the way I want all the others to be. I have some run-once script voodoo to set the IP address of each machine based on its Mac address, and to munge some ByHost user preferences for the built-in guest account. Then, I use Carbon Copy Cloner">Carbon Copy Cloner to create an image of that machine's hard drive.
Once I have an image of the machine, I use NetRestoreNetRestore (by the same guy as CCC) to create a netboot image that will automatically install the master machine's HD image onto each client.
I am fortunate to have a MacOS X Server machine on which to run the NetBoot server - which is independent of the subnet's master DHCP server, I might add - but it is possible to netboot macs from other Unix machines with a bit of patching to dhcpd.
Anyhow, all in all I don't find it any more difficult to netinstall Macs than it is to do the same for Windows machines. Building the master clone image is time consuming and annoying, but it always will be for any platform.
Feel free to email me if you are interested in my machine setup voodoo script. I had to borrow some binaries from OS X Server in order to make it work. It's slowly turning into something useful as I add more functionality to it.