MacOS on Michael’s Domain

Windows changes my computers clock

Mon, 28 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

If I am not mistaken, Windows is the only OS, that uses local time for the system clock (instead of UTC). This means that in multiple boot configurations, every restart of the system into Windows will screw up the system time. In order to reset it (in Ubuntu 16.04), usesudo timedatectl set-timezone Etc/UTC

Binhexed attachments and Mozilla (hexbin, macutils)

Sat, 26 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

OK, today I tried to open the final version of the manuscript for Cell & Tissue Research. My boss sent it to me as an e-mail attachment some 2 weeks ago. I use Mozilla Mail and saved the attachment. Open Office didn’t manage to open it. Obviously my boss uses still Macintosh binhex encoding to attach files to his e-mail instead of MIME to make himself as incompatible to the rest of the world as possible. There is luckily the command line utility hexbin in Linux, which converts the binhexed file into some readable stuff:hexbin -3 Lymphangio_review_CTR.docThat is the theory. The conversion didn’t succeed with the error message “unexpected EOF”. I suspected that Mozilla was involved and thus I used pine to extract the attachment and voila hexbin managed to convert the macintosh-gibberish into three files.For these three different files the only useful part (the Word Document data) appeared as Lymphangio_review_CTR.doc.data. From this I still had to delete the .data ending and Open Office had no problems anymore to open it. Whow. It took me only 2 hours to figure out all that stuff (including to set up pine locally to access the e-mail server via SSL-secured connection). I still have to figure out why Mozilla Mail handles binhexed attachments wrongly…The hexbin utility is e.g. included in the macutils package (available for Suse and RedHat).

Mac-Linux Connectivity (netatalk, atalk, Appletalk)

Sat, 26 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Connecting from a Macintosh to LinuxI did this already a while ago, but just for documentation purposes: You need to install a Appletalk server on your Linux machine. The package you need is called netatalk. Things worked OK, I just had a problem concerning Appletalk zones. Despite setting the default zone in the atalkd.conf file as “Biomedicum cancerbio” (the zone I want to be in), netatalk overrides this upon service restart. Thus my linux machine ends up always in the default zone (which is called in Finnish “Kadotus”).The atalkd obviously has to negotiate the zone somehow with the router, but how? Macs obviously manage to stay in the zone that they specifcy in their Preferences. They only end up in “Kadotus” when they do not specify a zone, consequently it should be possible to do so as well under Linux. By try and error I figured out that changing the zone in /etc/atalk/atalkd.conf doesn’t do the trick. One has to delete the default entry in /etc/atalk/afpd.conf and replace it by another entry (in Suse 9 the location is /etc/netatalk instead of /etc/atalk):"Michael's Linux Box@Biomedicum cancerbio" -transall -uamlist uams_clrtxt.so,uams_dhx.so -nosavepasswordand then the definition of the shares (in the AppleVolumes.default):"Public" -uamlist uams_guest.so -loginmesg "Welcome guest!"However, netatalk is actually only needed in order to connect from older Macs to Linux. Mac OS X can run SAMBA and to my experience file sharing using SAMBA is more reliable than netatalk. Long file names (I think >31 characters) got netatalk to choke in several cases, while SAMBA did the trick without any problems. Both Mac OS X and Linux support filenames >31 characters, but apparently netatalk doesn’t.Connecting from Linux to MacintoshNow this depends on whether you want to connect to a Mac running OS 9.2 or below or Mac OS X. To be able to connect to a Mac running OS 9.2 or below, you need the afpfs module. This module is not maintained and the last compilation has been done for the 2.1 kernel. Meaning: you are most probably out of luck unless you are a real geek (or you use the still the 2.1 kernel). In order to connect from Linux to Mac OS X, you just should use SAMBA. In GNOME you just need to type smb:// into the Location field of the Nautilus browser window and you will see the domains/workgroups/computers that are visible on the network. I admit network discovery is quite slow. So if you know the workgroup or domain name (e.g. mcbl as in my case), just type smb://mcbl

Duplicating Macintosh-formated (hfs and hfs+) CDs under WindowsXP with Nero Express

Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Although a standard Windows XP Professional OS cannot read (= mount) Macintosh-formatted CDs (neither hfs nor hfs+), the burning program Nero Express can duplicate such CDs!

Start netatalk as system service during bootup on Suse Linux 9

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I am missing from Suse Linux 9 a nice GUI that collects ALL system services with the options “start”, “stop” and “start on every system boot”. RedHat 9 has something like that. There is Yast2, but under the services, netatalk is not even listed. To boot netatalk during system boot, I just create manually a link: cd /etc/init.d/rc5.d sudo ln -s ../atalk S22atalk After rebooting (and to my surprise) my computer froze. No Ctrl-Alt-F2, no access via ssh; the only rescue being the physical reboot button button (something I am only used to from my Macintosh times). After rebooting in safe mode and removing the link everything is fine again. When I manually start atalk, the system freezes in the same way after a couple of seconds…

Converting Mac text files into UNIX text files (tr)

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

If you though text files are all the same, you are wrong. Mac text file lines end with a carriage return (CR, ASCII 13), UNIX text file lines with a line feed (LF, ACII 10) and Microsoft Windows text file lines end with a combination of 2 characters: CR followed by LF. From Mac to Unix you convert with this command line: tr '\015' '\012' out_file

Windows XP and deleting files with invalid filenames (The system cannot find the path specified)

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I was fighting for several days to delete a file in Windows XP that started with dot underscore (.). The message was always: “The system cannot find the path specified”. Nothing worked. No safe mode, no command line, no special syntax. The Microsoft Knowledge Base addresses the problem, but instead of pointing to an easy solution it gives lots of useless and even wrong information , e.g the Windows XP Resource Kit didn’t contain the RM.EXE program, that was supposed to be able to delete those files with “weird” file names. Finally I found a software called Delete FXP Files , that did the job for me. However, how on earth did Windows manage to created such a file in the first place if its file name is invalid? The dot underscore . comes obviously from Macintosh, but in any case Windows must have allowed the creation of that file…

How to mount a partition formatted with UFS (UNIX file system) and the partitioner included with the MacOS X installer

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

fdisk is not really able to read the partition table that the Macintosh installer writes. To figure out what you have you can e.g. use the Yast partitoning tool. mount -t ufs -o ufstype=openstep -o ro /dev/sda3 /media/misc