Entries Tagged 'Linux' ↓

Duh?! Physical access to any machine makes it highly vulnerable to accessing the contents of its storage media. Apple knows that. Any IT manager worth spitting on knows that. Steve Ballmer probably knows that. George Bush might even know that! These guys who developed the cold memory dumper are butt stupid because it’s a waste of time and effort. This is no big secret or mystery. If you have an OS X install disk that is not older than that particular Mac, you can simply put the disk in, force power down, restart booting from the install disk, from the Utilities menu launch Reset Password Utility. This allows you to change the password for any account on any connected bootable volume as well as enable the Root account! That’s a hell of a lot easier than this bullshit attack.Apple’s not stupid and this is no secret.If you really, really need more security, you simply do not allow physical access to the computer. Need more? Do not allow network connectivity. Need more? Enable a firmware password on the drive. Need more? Get custom firmware that disables startup keys normally available on the Mac OS. Need more? Be a Luddite.Security is always a trade-off with any connectivity. The old phrase Boot Access IS Root Access exists for a reason. 

You may have tried unsuccessfully to install the Ruby Gem ultraviolet or the gem it depends on, textpow, and if you did, it likely failed mysteriously. Well, you first need to download and install the Oniguruma regex library. These instructions should work on almost any *nix with GCC, as well as OS X 10.4 and 10.5 !First, go to  http://www.geocities.jp/kosako3/oniguruma/ and download the latest version of Oniguruma. (as of this writing, 5.9.1) In terminal, cd to the directory you downloaded the tarball to.Un-tar it: tar zxf onig-5.9.1.tar.gz Change to the directory of the un-tarred stuff:cd onig-5.9.1 Configure it, in most cases, just add the PATH you use, normally, /usr/local ./configure --prefix=/usr/local After that’s finished, sudo make and then,sudo make install
 Now, you can install that oniguruma gem with no trouble! Same goes for textpow and ultra edit. 

Some Ruby Gems are better than others. Some are great once they are working, but how to get them working is not always obvious… BlueCloth (the Ruby implementation of Markdown) is one of these. Unfortunately, simply doing sudo gem install BlueCloth is not enough. The BlueCloth home page, a Trac site, does not tell you squat about it either. So what do you do? Well, as with any gem that doesn’t just install easily and work with a simple require 'gem_name_here', the first thing to do is look in the gem’s directory!!If you do not know where your gems are, at the command line do gem environment and you will see the path to your gems. Copy that path and cd to it. Then do ls and you will see you’re still not there. cd gems will get you into the proper directory for the gems.Once there, you will notice that each gem has a directory with the name and version number of the gem itself. In this case, cd BlueCloth* should be enough to get you into the BlueCloth directory. If you do have more than one version, you will need to add the version number to that.Once inside the BlueCloth directory, you will see a README and install.rb, first read the README. Hmmm… it is not real clear language, but it does indicate you will need to run install.rb. OK. In the same directory, run ruby install.rb and you should see a few lines:Cloth Installer Revision: 1.3 Testing for the StrScan library...foundTesting for the Devel-Logger library...foundInstalling   If you get any error message, you either need to use sudo to do it, or you just do not have enough permissions/privileges on that machine.  If you get no error message, then you can now use BlueCloth for converting Markdown to html!In any normal Ruby code, simply be sure to add:
require 'rubygems'
require 'bluecloth' In a Rails application, simply add the second require line in application.rb and you will be ok to use BlueCloth from within your Rails application. You can actually use both require lines there, but the require for rubygems is just taking up space on the page at this point. If Rails is working, then RubyGems has already been required somewhere else! The beautiful thing is, BlueCloth is easy to use and very effective!  One more thing… this information is true on Linux, OS X, and any *NIX installation. On windows… I have no idea. Personally, I cannot see why people go through the pain of programming on windows, except that it can pay the bills…? 

Finally, I found the new OS for the old iBook. It was kind of under my nose the whole time. Continue reading →

Yoda would say, “Persistent are you! Mmm!” And he’d be right. (she?) I finally seem to have found a way to get the Ubuntu installer to run on this old iBook! I tried all the easily available ISO’s. Burned them at slow speeds. But the one thing I hadn’t really done was try for the ‘text-based’ install. Trouble is, it’s not available on their current crop of live CD’s as an option at yaboot’s boot prompt. Through random trial and error and lots of semi-successful Googling, I found an answer that works (so far, installer is still going).

Download the “ubuntu-6.10-alternate-powerpc.iso”. Put it in the CD tray of the clamshell iBook, press the power button to turn it on and hold the C key on the keyboard until you see the often intimidating text screen! Don’t be afraid. At the prompt that says “boot” you just type install-powerpc !!!
And press enter!

You may still see this error at some point: PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 0 of device 0001:10:18.0 Others ask about it online, nobody seems to have an answer that shows up on Google.

Either way the installation will take place, with plenty useable colored text screens that look more like BIOS screens on windows, but nicer.

We’ll see in a while what happens with it…

I got YDL (Yellow Dog Linux) installed on the old clamshell iBook. It’s the first Linux to install on there successfully. But I have to say, their E17 ‘enlightenment’ GUI is horrible.

It looks like something that would’ve come from the early 90’s almost. What’s shocking is that the system doesn’t automatically recognize the proper hardware in a Mac! I mean talk about a finite number of hardware configuration possibilities: an iBook! This is all pretty disappointing. But what’s worse is, there seems to be no GUI method of setting the monitor gama, which means everything is washed out to hell. And then there is no mouse/keyboard control panel !!

I’d like to use the working install and switch to KDE or Gnome, but I’d prefer even more to just run one of the Ubuntus on that thing.

The greatest irony of all thus far: OS X Panther is far snappier on that iBook than YDL! Not to mention it just works right all the time. Still I was hoping for a chance to explore Linux on that thing a bit more, but this just seems ridiculous.

If you’re thinking about running Linux on an older PPC machine, think twice.

After many go rounds with various Linux distros and failed installs on the old clamshell iBook, it seems I may have found a winning solution. Continue reading →

I’ve been playing with Linux on two machines the past two days. An old clamshell iBook (whose noisy HD irritates the hell out of me) and an old Dell Latitude (whose overall lack of quality just irritates me). Continue reading →

The other day, a friend unloaded an old Dull Platitude (dell latitute) notebook on me. Physically it looked to be OK, but of course the built-in track pad and mouse buttons are sketchy. Oh! It also had a failed life as a Win2K machine. Initially, I tried to install Kubuntu (basically Ubuntu, but with KDE desktop instead of Gnome desktop for the GUI, which means it’s Debian Linux under all of that.) Last night, I tried and tried, but no luck. So today, on a whim, I reinstalled Win2K (wiping the HD). Seemed OK until reboot and it mistakenly believed itself to have only a 640 x 480 screen with 16bit color depth!! What junk Windows is!!
I was considering learning some Windows programming (*shudder*) but it just isn’t worth all of that. Then, on one last whim, I decided to pop in that Kubuntu CD I made again to see if a refreshed hard drive made a difference… WOW !! I guess Windows is good for one thing: wiping out a corrupted windows installation to prepare for Linux!! Woohoo!!
As I type this on my beloved iBook G4, Kubuntu is installing on the Dull Platitude and it’s getting real close to done! So I will now have a second dev machine to monkey around with.

Now if I can just get that old clamshell iBook G3 to boot off the Linux live CDs for PPC… then we’d be in serious business!

The dreaded “No such file to load — rubygems (LoadError)” came to me today. I recently installed some Python stuff, and I ran OS X Software Update. Either one could have been the culprit, but in this case it was the Python installation. Continue reading →