Hide in the fog

So, i have bought myself a MacBook Pro 13″!

The good:

I have decided on this machine, because it is robust, has quite recent hardware and a long battery lifetime. Thats all.

The bad:

OS X Lion is crap!!! How many usability idiots are working at Apple? After 3 weeks of trying out OS X, i gave up. I am NOT WILLING to learn all the keystrokes which one needs to create a folder, copy stuff or even go to a specific directory. There is more bullshit in OS X which makes this operating system one of the worst i have ever seen on earth (and i have seen and worked on a lot of different OS). Ever searched for the option to show hidden files or directories in the Finder?! The only positive thing of OS X is the UNIX system under the hood. Thank god, using midnight commander makes OS X usable!

The ugly:

After i decided that i want a BETTER OS on the MacBook, i searched for away to install Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora on this machine. What works (booting etc.) on almost any other hardware will NOT WORK on Apple’s machines. I knew that and so i searched for different solutions. Thankfully, many other people had the same problems, so there exists plenty of documents on the net.

Apple, please do better! Do not feed your lawyers but your developers! And, please give up your restrictions as you promised in your early commercials!

Hello,

today i’ve updated to WP 3.2.1. Hopefully everything works fine.

Yesterday was a bad day for me. I did a really stupid thing.

Never ever mount your (web)server with root permissions under nautilus (with SSH) in your local home directory and chmod at the same time recursively your home.

Guess what happens?! It will automatically chmod all your files on your (web)server too! Remember being root there.

So, to make a long story short: I had to reinstall the whole thing after the nice people from vlinux.de did a fresh install of the virtual server. Luckily i could backup all the important data like the mysql-database or the emails. Maybe this is a good chance to try a different web-server, like cherokee? Lets see, if i can get everything back running as it was before.

Hello,

today i needed to re-install syscp, since it got lost from the last upgrade. By doing so, courier and postfix also got removed and instead dovecot was installes. Dovecot additionally fixed my login problems which i had with courier-imap and german umlauts. It also seems to be faster and lighter then courer?

Today, i decided to do some updates on the server. So i updated debian, wordpress and removed roundcube. The reason for removing roundcube was that i screwed the roundcube upgrade. Instead of roundcube, i installed Hastymail. So far, i like it a lot, since it is cleaner and faster then roundcube.

After struggling around with OpenSolaris 2008.11, i have decided to install some new shiny sort of ubuntu. So i downloaded the 64 bit version of linux mint version 5 (which is based on ubuntu hardy) and upgraded it to intrepid (and the corresponding felicia). I needed the 64 bit version not only due to the 6GB RAM in my computer,  but also due to some performance gains, which i recognized especially in the calculation of large matrices.

Recently, after listening to a talk by Detlef Drewanz, i spent two whole days installing OpenSolaris 2008.11 from www.opensolaris.org. I was astonished that my NVidia card worked out of the box with all the fancy 3D stuff. But then i tried to get more involved into costumizing my installation. And there the trouble began:

The first installation on my work pc was fine but the user i created was not in the root group/profile. So i had to reboot into single user mode and change the /etc/user_attr file. Just add “;roles=root” to the user in order to achieve a “su -” and gain root rights. (I don’t know if this is a good idea from the security point of view?) Updates and other installations worked smoothly on that pc.

But why is the (default) user “jack” still existing after the installation? This, in my opinion, could lead to severe security problems?

But i also wanted to try out OpenSolaris at home. So i installed it on my home pc and found out, that my US-Robotics WLAN (zyd driver) adapter was NOT working. Drivers are avaible but needed to be compiled, which was not possible because of missing internet connection. (What was first the egg or the chicken?) So i thought i could connect a old router, with dd-wrt configured as client bridge, to the ethernet port. Full success under Linux. But full failure under OpenSolaris 2008.11, because the Attansic network device was also NOT working. Drivers are avaible here but i was unable (due to missing documention!) to install the binary modules. I also could not compile the source, due to missing development environment, which is due to the missing internet connection.

So, i’m giving up on OpenSolaris until the frustrated userbase is big enough, that Sun (and others) will create a usable OpenSolaris edition, which includes at least all possible network drivers and a good documentation project. A dvd edition of OpenSolaris with a whole development environment would also be great.

Hello,

My lovely wife and I where on vacation to Berlin. There, we watched the great show “Glücksbringer” starring Dr. Eckart von Hirschhausen. If you get a chance to see him, go for it. It is really fun and contemplative at the same time.

I also bought a Asus eee PC 1000H, which came with Windows XP and a 160GB HardDisk. The battery life is really good. It kept up running more than 4 hours hard work. Back home, i installed Ubuntu (eee PC edition?) on that tiny little thing. Now i rellay have a toy to play with.

After some time, i managed to get GNOME Photo Printer back online again. The links to the packages remained but the website link has changed. You can find the newest versions at the right menu-bar under projects and GNOME Photo Printer.

Also, i removed the german description of how to use gimp for making panoramo pictures. The description was outdated and there exist some good programs (hugin and Panorama Tools) which will assist the user by creating panorama views.