It became very annoying that I couldn’t scroll with using two fingers on my trackpad, like on the new ones. Now I have the right patch to do the same on the older PowerBooks! “iScroll2 ” Two-Finger-Scrolling for pre-2005 PowerBooks and iBooks. It’s a free and GPL-ed patch, based on an existing GPL-ed driver written by Apple.

Apple has recalled all off the by sony build batteries for some Mac laptops build after October 2003. Mine included! The battery can explode (see picture of some poor sole…) I’ve submitted my Exchange Process Information and a new battery will arrive within 6 weeks. After my new battery is here, I’ve to send back my old one. Apple suggests that I don’t use the battery anymore.

I like my Mac, the only thing is the iSync app! Apple did everything to the OS to make it realy nice to work with. But when you have a PDA with linux or windows you have a problem syncing it. I have KDE installed, compiled every sync app I could find, but still no luck! Yes with Pocket PC it worked, but I had to buy the missing-sync app. And every nice tool I wanted, is also not available in GPL or freeware. So back to Opie. Again the sync problem… Why is .Mac only SyncML compatible an not free?! Why? Why?! Apple’s Xcode tools includes stuff to build new plugins for other devices, only Cocoa is not my thing… (Any volunteers?) Now found a few possibilities to make my own sync tool. I found out that Opie runs a Qtopia FTP server on port 4242. It’s GPL, so all the commands are in the source ;) Just search for "FTP SERVICE COMMANDS". Opie saves everything in xml. Only I didn’t found the description/reference yet. But it could be backwards engineerd. Apple’s iCal saves standard iCalendar format and can be used in every programming language. Now I know PHP, and this is all do-able with PHP ;) And it’s standard on every Mac OS X box. Just get the datebook.xml from Opie’s FTP and read it into an array. Do the same with the .ics file from the Mac (more work, but again it can be done). Than make a routine that matches/merge the two array’s. That write 2 files again from the merged array and write them back the same way they’ve come. My only consern is the memory the array’s consume. I need a backend. MySQL rules, but isn’t standard. Maybe XML is an option, but slow. (Any ideas are welcome.) As frontend I can use a simple AppleScript app with only one button ‘iFinalySyncOpie’… When this all works, I should thake a look how this can be done with the Addressbook and the notes… And than maybe rewrite it in Java and make a nice frontend. If somebody knows a goodway to sync Opie with Apple’s iCal and Addressbook, please drop me at daantje dot nl a email. Mind the at and dot ;)

I had troubles compiling ncurses with the fink packagement system. Every time i did a ‘fink selfupdate’ the compiler stopped on a error. I fiddled with it for 2 days, and the answer is simple. You need Apple’s gcc-4.0.8, available in Xcode 2.2. However the fink site is telling they have troubles, I don’t!

I’ve installed Debian unstable on an iMac (PowerPC). I will upload my configuration files of XFree and my kernel here. I’ve used the ‘jigdo-lite’ application to master a Debian-non-us (woody) installer iso for the ppc. It worked very easy! Than I altered the /etc/apt/sources.list to the unstable sources, did an apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade and after a hour I had Debian Sid running on it! I had some difficulties configuring my Firewire LaCie DVD wirter, but it’s working now. You must apt-get install hotplug and compile the sbp2 and enable ieee1394 in the kernel to make it work. Did not get it to work with dvdrecord. I use ‘dvd+rw-tools’ instead. I use the 2.4.25 kernel on it now.

It is possible to run MacOS-X within a Linux or Windows desktop, by running this PPC emulator. I’ve tested it under Debian (sid) and it works great. Check it! PearPC is great! And open source! Why buy expensive emulators when you’ve got better GPL-ed ones?

This realy works like a charm! Download and install this driver on the mac. Reboot the Mac. Now go to your ‘System Preferences’ and than ‘Network’. Now the Mac should say something about a new interface he found (en2 in my case). Add the just found port. Now it should appear as an Ethernet Adaptor. Choose it and change the IP configuration to manual and use these settings:

IP address: 192.168.0.200
subnetmask: 255.255.255.0
router: 192.168.0.200

Click the ‘apply’ button. Now to share the Internet connection you should go to the main preferences panel and click the ‘Sharing’ icon. Click the ‘internet’ tab and sat the ’share your internet connection’ to the device where your internet is connected to, in my case ‘Airport’ and set the ‘To computers using:’ to the ‘Ethernet Adaptor (en2)’. Hit start. Now your done. These settings are based on the standard settings of Opie 1.x. More info coming later.

I’ve got it working… finaly… What I did was editing ‘/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc’ and put in this:

/sw/bin/startkde &
/sw/bin/kwin &
xlogo -geometry 50x50-1+1

Started Xdarwin in ‘full screen‘ mode and whoopy, it’s starting a KDE desktop… I hope my quanta is now more stable than under OroborOSX and rootless Xdarwin. My quanta crashes after scrolling pages. Don’t know what the problem is. Trying everything…

Update: This works like a charm! Got native KDE 3.5 running right now!

Every time when I tried to start MySQL, I got these errors:

031209 14:10:32 mysqld started

031209 14:10:33 Can’t start server : Bind on unix socket: Permission denied

031209 14:10:33 Do you already have another mysqld server running on socket: /tmp/mysql.sock ?

031209 14:10:33 Aborting

031209 14:10:33 /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld: Shutdown Complete

031209 14:10:33 mysqld ended

It’s something with the file permitions. When I start it with this it works… Don’t have the right sollution yet…

sudo /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe –user=root

This is how you can make a SSH tunnel to an other machine in an other network. This is my situation:

my-local-machine -> my-router -> INTERNET <- remote-router <- remote-local-machine

Syntax:
ssh -g -L [my-local-port]:[remote-local-machine]:[remote-local-port] [username]@[remote-router]

Example:
I do this on my local machine…

ssh -g -L 81:192.168.1.2:80 user@remote.router.wan.ip

Now you can do in your own browser http://localhost:81 and you should
get the webserver on the remote-local-machine from the other network.
This you can do with any local port to any remote port, only remember
that the local port should not be in use allready. This works on all Linux, MacOS-X and Unix systems.