iOS and Mac developer
I just added an Adaptec FireWire/IEEE1394 card to my Linux box.
At first, my network interface was disabled because it tried to use FireWire for en0. I was able to fix it easily by simply removing the ieee1394 ethernet module and everything worked fine after that. I connected a Mac formatted FireWire drive, mounted it with ‘mount -t hfsplus /dev/sda’ and it recognized the drive.
I decided to try Linux on my iPod. It was sort of fun, but I found that it will only play MP3s, while most of my music is AAC. Even though it doesn’t mess up anything on the iPod and you can still run the standard OS, I completely restored my iPod to make sure it’s really clean.
When I restored my iPod in iTunes, I found that I was offered 13 free songs in iTunes Music Store.
Yesterday I bought a Brother HL-1440 laser printer, which Office Depot is selling for $128 plus a $30 mail-in rebate. This is a great printer even at the original $150 price, but you can’t beat a laser printer for under $100.
It can print about 3,000 sheets with a $60 toner cartridge, which makes it a lot more economical than my Epson C82. It can’t do color and is less flexible than the Epson, but it’s much better for heavy daily use.
I connected it to my Linux box and shared it via CUPS so I can print to it from my Macs.
I now have iTunes library sharing working in Linux, thanks to this article at O’Reilly network. Although the article refers to Ubuntu Linux, I was able to install mt-daapd and howl easily in Debian.
I back up my home directory on the PowerBook to the Linux box, so I pointed mt-daapd to the backup of my iTunes Music folder. The linux box shows up as another source in iTunes, and it even streams my protected AAC files from iTunes Music Store.
Last week I installed a 120G drive, which I got for $85 from CPU Solutions, in my G4 minitower, replacing the old 40G secondary drive (it also has an 80G drive). Since I have lots of disk space, I partitioned it for Linux as well as Mac OS X. I also have Jaguar installed on the smaller drive so I can test software with it.
Today I installed Ubuntu Linux on it. The installation was very fast & painless. I first partitioned the drive with Disk Utility, leaving a large unallocated space as well as the OS X partition. When I booted from the Ubuntu CD, it created the Linux partitions and did the rest. Less than an hour later, I was running Linux. Ubuntu is based on Debian, so I was able to easily add packages and update everything to the latest version using Synaptic.
I just found out that TiVo’s Linux source code is available for download.
I upgraded my DirecTV service to TiVo today. Interestingly the manual includes a GNU General Public License – it turns out the box runs a variety of Linux.
TiVo is great – I can pause & rewind live TV at any time and there are lots of recording options, including a wish list that lets me record a particular show whenever it appears.
I now have the tape drive working on my server and I was able to make a successful backup. Unfortunately it introduced a new problem: I can no longer burn CDs.
The tape drive (a Seagate TapeStor 20) is connected as the slave device on the same IDE controller with the CDR/DVD combo drive. Both use the ide-scsi driver which makes them look like SCSI devices. When the system boots both devices are recognized and identified as SCSI devices, but cdrecord isn’t able to access the drive & scanning the bus fails to identify it.
I’ve added the second drive & tape backup to my Linux box today. I still haven’t been able to get RAID fully working.
I’m setting up the drive as RAID level 1 with my existing drive and I’m able to get the new drive to be recognized and created a RAID array containing that one drive with the old drive marked missing. I’m even able to start it and have it recognized automatically or mount it. If the partition type is NOT raid autodetect (FD), I’m even able to boot from that drive but the RAID device won’t work. If I set the partition type for autodetect, it’s recognized by the kernel and started, but I get a kernel panic when it tries to mount that filesystem.
UPDATE: I got it working. I had to specify root=/dev/md0 on the kernel boot command line
I ordered a second 120G drive and a PCI IDE controller for my server. I plan to set it up as RAID level 1 with my current drive. I’m putting it on a separate controller for better performance than having both RAID drives on the same controller. I’ve already downloaded the RAID tools and built a kernel with PCI IDE and RAID support.