iOS and Mac developer
My server is back up running Edgy Eft and it seems stable so far. I installed Edgy under Parallels and found it very reliable, although it looks like upgrading a Dapper system seems to cause problems for a lot of people.
The project I mentioned a few days ago is XPressLinux, which is just getting started. Xen will come in very handy for this, which is why I installed Edgy.
Yesterday I attempted to upgrade my server from Ubuntu 6.06 (dapper) to 6.10 (edgy eft) with disastrous results. The upgrade was incomplete & after it finished X11 wouldn’t start. I booted up in recovery mode and completed the install and was able to start X11 and have most things working. Unfortunately it got worse from there. When I rebooted it would always freeze when checking devices. It turns out my boot drive was bad.
Luckily I had a spare drive so I was able to replace it. I did a clean install from a Dapper CD and I’m now in the process of upgrading to Edgy before I install anything else. That will take a few hours.
I started a new project related to Linux, which I can’t say too much about. I’ll post more details as it progresses.
Ubuntu Linux 6.10, known as Edgy Eft, was officially released today. I’ve been running the release candidate on several machines for a while. I find that Parallels Desktop is great for testing out a new release like this. I’m still running 6.06 (Dapper) on my server, though.
I installed Ubuntu Linux on my G4 minitower, which I now have set up to boot OS X 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, as well as Mac OS 9. I also got MacOnLinux running and was able to boot Tiger while running Linux. Unfortunately it’s so slow that it’s unusable.
Here are some very nice enhancements for Linux desktops using an accelerated video driver. Unfortunately it won’t work with the old ATI Radeon card in my Linux box. I’ve been using Baghira with KDE for a nice Mac-like desktop.
One of my big projects in the last week was setting up LDAP on my Linux server and configuring a Mac to use it for authentication. It took me a few days to get the server working, but once I understood the schema & naming conventions, I was able to figure it out easily.
I needed to test a piece of software which required administrative access but failed when using an Active Directory login. Since I don’t have an AD server, I was able to test it with LDAP by enabling it in Directory Access. I was able to log in with a userid defined on the server rather than locally and debug the software.
Today I added an internal DVD burner to replace the CD writer in my server. I got a Toshiba 16x DVD+-R/RW with LightScribe support. It will make a good backup device for my server. I originally had an 8G Travan tape drive. The tapes were slow, expensive, hard to find, and limited capacity. DVD-R media is a lot cheaper even though two DVDs are roughly equivalent to one tape.
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I added two 320G drives to my server, configured as RAID1. I previously had a RAID1 setup of two 120G drives. Unfortunately I don’t have enough drive bays & power connectors for more than 3 drives, so I had to remove one of the 120s. After some manual editing of the partition table and deleting the old RAID device, I converted the remaining drive to a bootable ext3 root file system without losing any data. To do that, I used fdisk to change the partition type from raid autodetect to linux (83). The new 320G RAID is mounted as /home. I’m now in the process of copying the data from the old home directories.
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