jro.codegrinder.com

I’ve been putting off upgrading the trusty MacBookPro to Leopard for a while. I use fink and the Unix-ey side of things quite a bit, and really wanted that to be stable. Well, turns out many of the apps I’d like to try out are now Leopard only. So, upgrade time.

But, with a twist. I’ve long lamented the quality of packaging on the Mac, fink and macports both have their failures and apple’s own package handling is very sad. Enter a new challenger: Hardy Heron - Ubuntu. I’ve used Linux in one form or another for what seems like forever. And, I miss it. So, I want to see how I like the current offering from Ubuntu.

I’ve setup the MBP to have two equal installations, each around 70G in size. I’ve used eEFIt to handle the bootloader issues. I’ve started to use this guide to get started on fixing things. Apparently, I have a 3rd rev MBP so I had a few issues with wifi early on. I’ll blog more about the tech details if I think other people would find them interesting. We’ll see.

What do I really expect?

Despite having more experience with Linux overall, I really think Leopard might win for me. There are a couple applications I’m not sure I can learn to live without. But, at the same time, I really, really miss a decent environment for using Unix apps. It’s also quite likely that I’ll end up continuing to dual boot, living mostly in Linux but booting to the OS X side for the few programs I can easily transition.

Bets?

Update - Useful links

• Ubuntu Guide
• MediaBuntu
• OpenGeu - E17 derivative of Ubuntu

I caught this Ruby Inside post about using ruby as an applescript replacement earlier today, and started reading the associated links, and searching for something I could try to do with ruby and applescript that might actually make my life a little easier.

Thanks to my friend Dave, I’ve been giving twitter a 2nd chance. So, I created a tiny script to let me tweet from the command line. It’ll either take arguments and use them as the input, or standard input. I’m sure I could have done it without using applescript or the wonderful Twitterrific, but that wouldn’t have been as much fun. This way I get Twitterrific’s niceties, and besides I always have it running anyway.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'appscript'

str = ARGV.join(" ")
if str.length == 0
 $stdin.each {|l| str << l}
end

Appscript.app('Twitterrific').post_update(str[0..139])

Usage:

jro@fireant:~$ tweet Having a great old time
jro@fireant:~$ tweet @someone that sounds like fun!
jro@fireant:~$ uptime | tweet 

Frequently mentioned on Lifehacker, Mozy Home is an incredibly economical network backup option at $5 a month. The online backup service will store an unlimited amount of data, and has Mac and Windows clients. The big caveat there is that you don’t have unlimited throughput, so it can still take a while to backup a large fileserver, say. In that case it’s especially important to be able to manage it effectively.

I’m currently using an old PPC-based Mac Mini, running Tiger, with a couple (or more) USB attached drives, as my home fileserver. For a long time I ran a Linux box with an internal RAID5 disk array, but with the advent of mozy and 5$ a month offsite backup, I’ve made the switch. It hasn’t been completely painless, however, so here are a couple notes about effectively using Mozy on a headless Mac.

• You still probably need VNC or that fancy new Leopard desktop-sharing feature, especially to install.

• Mozy has a command line interface! Enable SSH on your Mac and check this out

bombe:~ jro$ /Applications/Mozy.app/Contents/Resources/MozyBackup help
Commands: start|cancel|auth|rescan|status|tempdir

bombe:~ jro$ /Applications/Mozy.app/Contents/Resources/MozyBackup status
Status: Backing up files...

Preparing (0.0 B/s): 
   70.9% 4925415586 of 6943326336

 Sending   (46.3 KB/s): blah_blah_20061012.tgz
    0.9% 87851008 of 9257768960

You can probably guess what most of the commands do. It’s great being able to start and cancel a backup on a whim, say when I upload more data to the server, or stop it when it’s messing with my VOIP call quality. I definitely recommend still having Mozy backup on a regular schedule, even if you’re doing a fair bit by hand. You never know if you’ll forget!

• Mozy has a very useful log.

bombe:~ jro$ sudo less /Library/Logs/Mozy.log

2008-03-15 12:43:55.229 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Starting backup
2008-03-15 12:43:55.231 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Checking for update
2008-03-15 12:43:56.821 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Connecting to r4165.mozy.client.ut2.berkeleydata.com (66.133.112.25)
2008-03-15 12:43:57.277 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Version is up-to-date (0.9.1.0)
...
2008-03-15 12:46:01.028 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Building backup set
2008-03-15 12:46:03.278 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Processing files in scan cache
2008-03-15 12:46:09.704 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Processing files in manifest but not in scan cache
2008-03-15 12:46:19.569 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Preparing 4 files (6943326336 bytes)
2008-03-15 12:46:19.570 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Unlocking cache...
2008-03-15 12:46:19.570 MozyBackup[31] (backup) Unlocked cache
2008-03-15 12:46:19.570 MozyBackup[31] (prepare) Starting
2008-03-15 12:46:19.575 MozyBackup[31] (send) Starting
2008-03-15 12:46:19.575 MozyBackup[31] (send) Getting files from queue
2008-03-15 12:51:12.245 MozyBackup[31] (send) Offering 1 files (0 are removes)

• Mozy can use your your encryption key. If you don’t want the guys at EMC/Mozy to know what kind of ahem data you’re storing on their machines, you can configure Mozy to use your own encryption key. This definitely increases the security of your data, just make sure you don’t lose that key, or you’ll be in a world of hurt come restore time.

I’ve been a pretty happy user of MacPorts/DarwinPorts for the past couple years, and all was good. I could install all the UNIX goodness to run a rails stack and have most of the network/security apps I was used to from the Linux world. But, recently I stuck in a dynamic library situation with ImageMagick and the rmagick ruby gem that was causing me a lot of grief. So, I removed ports and my gems and started over, but still no dice.

In a perfect world, I’d have rolled back to the last working ImageMagick package and go on my happy way. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be an option with MacPorts if you don’t have the old versions still compiled on your system. Of course, I didn’t because I naively decided to start from a blank slate (see above). Ultimately, I decided to try the out Fink before digging too deeply into how to fix the linking issue.

I’d used Fink for about a month when I first dipped my toe into the Mac waters, so I had some idea how the system worked. It’s based on some Debian tools like dpkg and apt-get, and offers both binary and source packages. Much like Debian, I had to immediately switch to unstable to get any sort of useful ruby install. Also, unless you can live in Candy Land and only need stable tree, I’d avoid using apt-get no matter how much your Debian/Ubuntu love makes you want to. The “fink” command line is really what you want.

And my favorite bit, is that I can rollback packages! Check it out:

jro@fireant:~$ fink dumpinfo -fallversions zsh
allversions:
 b      4.2.6-1001
        4.3.4-2

jro@fireant:~$ fink install zsh
.....compile compile compile.. this is unstable after all.....
jro@fireant:~$ fink dumpinfo -fallversions zsh
allversions:
 b      4.2.6-1001
 bi     4.3.4-2

jro@fireant:~$ fink install zsh-4.2.6-1001
The following package will be installed or updated:
 zsh
/sw/bin/apt-get-lockwait -q --ignore-breakage --download-only install zsh=4.2.6-1001
Reading Package Lists...
Building Dependency Tree...
The following packages will be DOWNGRADED
  zsh 
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 downgraded, 0 to remove and 0  not upgraded.
Need to get 2087kB of archives. After unpacking 1524kB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 
......
...... downgrade...install..yay!....
......

jro@fireant:~$ fink dumpinfo -fallversions zsh
allversions:
 bi     4.2.6-1001
 b      4.3.4-2

jro@fireant:~$ fink install zsh-4.3.4-2   
The following package will be installed or updated:
 zsh
Reading buildlock packages...
/sw/bin/dpkg-lockwait -i /sw/fink/dists/unstable/main/binary-darwin-i386/shells/zsh_4.3.4-2_darwin-i386.deb
(Reading database ... 30667 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace zsh 4.2.6-1001 (using .../zsh_4.3.4-2_darwin-i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement zsh ...
Setting up zsh (4.3.4-2) ...

jro@fireant:~$ fink dumpinfo -fallversions zsh
allversions:
 b      4.2.6-1001
 bi     4.3.4-2

From a mailing list entry by William Davis, ::

sudo rm -rf \
/opt/local \
/Applications/MacPorts \
/Library/Tcl/macports1.0 \
/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.* \
/Library/StartupItems/DarwinPortsStartup

Why? Well if like me you run into some strange OS X dynamic linking issues and want to reinstall all your ports, or if you want to try out fink and make sure you don’t end up hitting your old ports applications.