/dev/random

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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I just found out that TiVo’s Linux source code is available for download.

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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I upgraded my Linux box from Kernel 2.4.21 to 2.6.8 and so far everything looks good. I also did an apt-get dist-upgrade to bring the rest of the system up to date.

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I’ve connected my Epson Stylus C82 to the Linux box and I’ve set up CUPS to allow browsing & remote printing. It took a few hours of trial and error, but I’m now able to print to it from any of my Macs.

The changes to /etc/cups/cupsd.conf were to add the commands:

Browsing On
BrowseAddress 192.168.0.255
BrowseAllow 192.168.0.*

Also, for [...]

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I just posted an article at MacMegasite detailing how I set up my Linux server for optimal usage with a Mac network.

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I now have my Linux server fully set up. One of my main uses for it is a file server for my Mac network. I tried Netatalk but had lots of problems with long filename handling & dealing with case sensitivity. When I would copy folders to the server, it would complain about file names [...]

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I decided to go with Libranet, a Debian based distribution with enhanced system administration utilities. I got it installed in less than an hour and everything worked perfectly. However, I’ve spent most of today updating the packages from apt, which has taken a lot longer than the original installation. Most of the time was spent [...]

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My new server just arrived, a day ahead of schedule. I already have Debian installed on it and everything is working nicely.

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The server shipped and should arrive Thursday. I’ve downloaded a few Linux distributions to decide which one to use. I’ve pretty much narrowed it down to Debian, Libranet, and Gentoo. I’ll see which one works best.

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I’ve ordered my new server, an AMD DURON 1.6GHz barebone system ($359 as configured) from CPU Solutions. I decided to go with Gentoo Linux as my OS. It’s not the fastest system, but it’s a lot faster than my old G3/350, which worked pretty nicely as a file server.

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It looks like a drive hardware failure. Since that machine is a fairly old 350 MHz G3 with a crappy IDE controller that can’t handle larger drives, I’ve decided to replace it with a Linux box, which will have at least a 120G drive. I’ll most likely use NFS for the file server.

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In a press release announcing that the Dell DJ is now supported on desktop Linux machines, Lindows CEO Michael Robertson noted that Apple had declined to allow the iPod to work on the operating system. “We talked with Apple Computer about supporting the iPod but they want to keep that a closed system,” said Robertson. [...]

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