Logging what I’m doing.

Clicked on New in “Virtual PC List”, selected “Other” for OS. Basically, this just lets us boot from a CD in a vanilla PC and install to a simple file on our Mac.

Downloaded BeOS Max Ed from here. Make sure to put the CD in, let it spin up and then click Start Up in Virtual PC. Otherwise, it just says Boot Failed over and over again while letting you select a or c. This drove me nuts and cost me a few CDRs.

The installer was black and white although this isn’t a huge deal according to someone else on the web. It should reboot in full color.
View image

In addition, I could not type on the keyboard otherwise the installer would freeze. Strange.

It took a long time, an hour and more. The Max edition certainly adds a lot of packages to the base BeOS install.

The GUI and most components were considerably slow during the installer (1.33ghz powerbook). Like a Pentium II 350mhz or something. Reminds me of the good old days before lighting quick video acceleration, OpenGL/DirectX interface components (Windows 2000). The mouse was very jerky, like the difference between a USB mouse and a PS2 mouse.

There was constant CD->Hard Disk activity. The powerbook fan would spin up every once and a while. It was hot and working hard. There is no progress bar in the BeOS installer.

Just go get some coffee :)

Virtual PC has a little IO bar at the bottom of the window. This was particularly useful to watch disk/cdrom activity like IDE lights on the front of a real PC to make sure everything wasn’t locked up. Orange lights mean writes and green lights mean reads.

Following a hello world tutorial, I got stuck on this error:

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no swt-carbon-3034

Couldn’t find anything so I thought I’d post the fix for someone like me out there:

Found it from an unusual source. Seems I couldn’t get the VM parameters to work so I have to do SWT’s not recommended suggestion of copying the file to the jre bin path. Although they never gave the file or the path! (I’m going to send them an email.)

Just do this:

cp [path to libswt-carbon-3034.jnilib] \
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.4.1/Libraries/

Note that libswt-carbon-3034.jnilib is version dependant. It could be named libswt-carbon “anything” .jnilib. I found in [ECLIPSE HOME] /plugins/org.eclipse.swt.carbon_3.0.0/os/macosx/ppc

So you’ve tried everything to get rid of the login delay to ProFTPd. You’ve configured ProFTPd over and over again but it still doesn’t work?! You’re not running ProFTPd in standalone mode and you’ve come to the end of your rope right!?!? “What is causing the login delay?!” you ask in vain, brandishing your cold and bitter fist to the storm clouds …

Read on and find salvation in the xinetd configuration.

1. First, lets take care of the ProFTP side. Make sure that you have global entries in your proftpd.conf file:

IdentLookups off
UseReverseDNS off

2. But we’re not done. If you are running ProFTP in xinetd mode (opposite of standalone), edit your /etc/xinetd.d/proftp (or equivalent) file and make sure that you don’t have any USERID entries under log_on_success or log_on_failure. Here’s an example that works:

service ftp
{
        disable = no
        flags                   = REUSE
        socket_type             = stream
        wait                    = no
        user                    = root
        server                  = /usr/local/sbin/proftpd
        log_on_success          += DURATION HOST
        log_on_failure          += HOST
        nice                    = 10
        #bind                   = [IP to bind to]
}

Notice that the places where you usually find “USERID” are replaced with “HOST”. The only drawback is that you won’t be able to identify remote users in your logs. But this rarely works anyway.

1. First off, proftp is unlikely to lookup remote users and log what UID they’re logged in as (I haven’t seen this work).
2. Second, IDENT (port 113) would have to be open on the remote host. This is unlikely in the modern age of the Internet where firewalls are typically rejecting this type of traffic.

If someone disagrees, shoot me an email.

After starting with a 386 back in 1990 and moving to Linux/Solaris professionally, I decided to jump into OSX when a requirement for a laptop came up in my new job.

What follows are my initial impressions after about a week. I provide mostly unseen screenshots, info, the good, the bad and the ugly.
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Last show with my band last night. Was a really great time. Lots of people showed. At least 50, maybe more. Which was impressive considering the cold.

The best part was at the end. We blew the power in the place. Very suiting for our last show. The whole strip mall was blacked out and the owners asked everyone to settle up their tab and get out. 10 minutes later, the lights went out, we were done with our last show and the parking lot had no lights even to light the way for the poor power technicians who were already on the call.

Don’t know if the power outage was our fault, but I’d like to think so. Go out with a bang.

Our whiteboard was appropriately dressed: