Inspirations

FYI my inspirations for starting this blog came from Riccardo Mori who has an excellent mac blog at his System Folder site;

http://systemfolder.wordpress.com

The whole reason I pulled my mac color classic out of the garage was because of his postings on his site and how he is using all of these old macs for truly productive purposes today!

Also there is a lot of good information on the system7today site at;

http://main.system7today.com/

From those two sites there are lots of links to a plethora of excellent sites such as the Macintosh Garden (for software), Apple's sites for software updates and OS software (some of which is free!) etc. Do yourself a favor and spend some time at each of those sites!!

Server Woes!!!!

Well the Ubuntu server upgrade crashed and burned horribly!! I ran the updates and they went fine, but in the end, the grub bootloader failed badly! I tried booting up with live-cd's, remounted the drives, tried to re-install grub etc. etc. and zip!

So, I blew it all away and started from scratch! Once it was back up I put some of my base software on it and then launched the netatalk install and.... nothing!! The mac color classic couldn't see it! I messed around with settings, over and over and over and nothing seemed to work. Finally, after google searching for forever and trying a million combinations I sat down and... gasp... read the manual! Finally things clicked!

First things first - once I installed the default netatalk packages through apt-get, I noticed that not all of the same services got started that were running before. After digging around I found that I needed to change some lines in /etc/default/netatalk to make atalkd (appletalk daemon), papd (printing daemon) and afpd (file sharing daemon) start up automatically by setting them to run=yes;

# Set which daemons to run.
# If you need legacy AppleTalk, run atalkd.
# papd, timelord and a2boot are dependent upon atalkd.
# If you use "AFP over TCP" server only, run only cnid_metad and afpd.
ATALKD_RUN=yes
PAPD_RUN=yes
TIMELORD_RUN=yes
A2BOOT_RUN=no
CNID_METAD_RUN=yes
AFPD_RUN=yes

Next up I needed to tweak the config files for the services afpd and atalkd. Ok, in /etc/netatalk/afpd.conf I changed it to;

- -tcp -ddp -uamlist uams_dhx.so,uams_dhx2.so,uams_clrtxt.so -nosavepassword

the keys to these settings are bolded above -ddp is needed for appletalk and uams_clrtxt.so is needed to support clear text passwords (again security concern for some, but not worried on my home network). Now in /etc/netatalk/atalkd.conf is set up like;

eth0 -seed -phase 2 -net 0-65534 -addr 1000.142

The key here is that on my network this linux box is the only server on the wire. Therefore, I needed to set up the appletalk daemon to be a seed on eth0 and set the address to 1000.142. Finally after all of this I restarted all the netatalk daemons as before by

/etc/init.d/netatalk restart

Finally firing up the color classic and hitting chooser (for the millionth time!) I saw the server listed and was able to connect to my home directory!! A quick edit of /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default to add in my other directory and I'm now back in business!! I hope this helps someone out there with setting this up! What a huge pain to get all figured out. My couple hour upgrade took a few days of messing around to finally get back to where I was!! Now, back to setting up that printer....

Netatalk - File sharing

Well I started playing around with WordPerfect and thought, "gee wouldn't it be nice to be able to save files to my file server"! Well, it turns out that it's simple to create some Apple compatible shares to do just that! Netatalk to the rescue! I'm running Ubuntu server on my file server (9.10 - whoa that's older than I thought!), so with a quick;

sudo apt-get install netatalk

I had everything I needed to start sharing! By default the system shared out my home directory on the server, but I decided to add to that and share out a dedicated space for the Mac. And with NFS and Samba I did the same for the other Windows and Unix machines in the house at the same time!

To set this up for the mac, you need to edit the file /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default. Here is how mine looks after editing;

~/ "Home Directory"
/opt/share/mac "macusers" options:upriv dperm:0770 fperm:0660

So now the directory /opt/share/mac will be shared out as "macusers" and available in the chooser. To make these changes active either restart your machine or hit the command line and do the following as root on the Linux machine (or sudo will work fine too!);

/etc/init.d/netatalk restart

Restarting Netatalk Daemons (this will take a while)
Stopping Netatalk Daemons: afpd cnid_metad papd timelord atalkd. ..
Starting Netatalk services (this will take a while): atalkd afpd papd. done.

Afterwards on the Mac I fired up the chooser, selected AppleShare and picked my server "Atlantis" from the list. After a quick authentication with my Linux userid and password - I was in!!

Security-wise I'm pretty sure this isn't that tough to break, so I wouldn't do this on an untrusted network, but at home, I'm not too worried. Next up, a bigger challenge, printing!! And I'm going to upgrade my Ubuntu server version as well!

WordPerfect 3.5e

It has begun!! I've managed to install some software on this old mac and get some things going! WordPerfect 3.5e is my first attempt and so far so good! I plan to use this as my "writing tool of choice". So far I've created a mini to-do list and opened up some existing text files - like the one shown here the "install log". I'm amazed at all the features this "old" word processor has. I'm inclined to think that for 95% plus of the people using a word processor, this decade plus old software would fit the bill just as well as today's would. I'm planning on comparing this with a new version of MS Word in a "vs" type article soon. Let the games begin...

Almost organized!

I just set up my new office and have the color classic sitting on one end of it now. Here is a shot of the actual machine. I've not yet mastered the "taking a picture of a computer screen (CRT) and make it look good" so this will have to do.

The mac looks a lot more yellow in person then this picture would lead you to believe. I also think it's about 10 pounds heavier in person... wait what?!

Color Classic back from the dead!

Just found my Color Classic out in the garage under a bunch of shelving doing nothing. My plan is to bring this old beast back inside and get it running with some old software and post my progress!


NOTE: Image here is for illustration as my color classic looks nowhere near this good - it is yellowed and faded from age. Hopefully one of my steps will reverse this for the old beast!



Quick rundown of its current state;

• Upgraded with an LC-575 motherboard (much quicker!)
• 30mb RAM
• 500meg hard drive (spacious - considering the age etc.!)
• 640x480 upgrade (slice and dice the analog board - looking into improving this soon)

Goals:

1. Use the system for email.
2. Write blog posts from it.
3. Play old games from time to time.
4. Use Retr0brite on it to return it to it's original (non-yellow) color!
5. Control my linux server from an ssh connection using MacSSH.

Hopefully I'll have lots of screenshots and useful posts that others can use to set something like this up for themselves. I also plan to link to sites where I get most of the software, howto's etc.