IE 4 Linux

For cross-browser testing you can thankfully run IE6 (and 5/4) on Linux with the handy IE4Linux package.

• IE 4 Linux

Assuming you’ve got WINE you’ll also need cabextract, so add a repository to your distro,

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt hardy main

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install cabextract

wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
cd ies4linux-*
./ies4linux

Click to create icon on Desktop, it’ll run thru downloading packages and prefixes for Wine after which you should have IE on your Linux distro, which will be accessible (if you lose the desktop shortcut) from,

wine /bin/ie6

Safari / WebKit

Apple’s Safari browser is powered by the WebKit rendering engine, which thankfully is an opensource project and can be installed and tested against on your Linux machine via a few steps (yep, i’ve run thru this and it does work).

First get the dependencies,

sudo aptitude install autoconf automake libtool bison flex 
gperf libicu-dev build-essential libxt-dev libsqlite3-dev 
libjpeg62-dev libpng12-dev libglibmm-2.4-dev libgtk2.0-dev 
libcurl4-openssl-dev libxslt1-dev

Now goto http://nightly.webkit.org/ and grab the latest nightly build.

Unzip and Terminal into the archive dir and build the source,

./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-svg-experimental
make

Once that’s all done (which will take a while) you should now have a mini-WebKit browser in which to test against via…

./Programs/GtkLauncher

Navigate to the ACID3 website to test for standards compliance here http://acid3.acidtests.org/.

You should get 100/100, WebKit is pretty on when it comes to standards.

If you’ve just switched over to Linux, you’re probably hating the default monospaced font; thankfully I’ve found some better ones…

Liberation

On May 9, 2007, Red Hat announced the public release of these fonts under the trademark LIBERATION at the Red Hat Summit. You are free to use these fonts on any system you would like. You are free to redistribute them under the GPL+exception license found in the download.

Liberation Fonts

Lucidia Grande

AppleGaramond, Aquabase, LITHOGRL, Lucida Grande, Lucida Mac, lucon, MacGrand

Thanks to Nylock for sharing this fonts with us

Mac Fonts

Installing

Once downloaded, usually to your desktop, you’re going to need to install them into your system to use. They need to be copied to the /usr/share/fonts directory.

First unzip the files, then open Terminal and…

cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype
sudo mkdir liberation
sudo mkdir apple-fonts

Here, you’ve moved into the location where the System’s fonts are stored, then created one directory for the liberation fonts (worth having), and the apple fonts.

Now copy the files to each directory from the desktop to liberation & apple-fonts,

sudo cp /home/[user]/Desktop/liberation-fonts/* /usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation
sudo cp /home/[user]/Desktop/fonts/* /usr/share/fonts/truetype/apple-fonts

Final bit, refresh the font cache…

sudo fc-cache -vf

Logout, login and your ready to use them.

Leopard HowTo

First in [Finder], press [command] + K to open the [Connect to Server] box.

Then type your network share’s ip address, e.g.

smb://192.168.1.99

Now click [Connect], and you’re off.

Belkin Router Problems + Finding the Box

Now recently I got a new ICYBOX IB-N4220-B NAS Enclosure which I now have running as a RAID 1 Array for my own networked WIFI storage, was a bit of a pain with my Belkin router.

Reason being when hooked up there’s no real way of testing to see which IP address it’s set to on bootup, the supplied CD comes with a tool the find it but that only works on Windows, and didn’t work on Vista.

So I hunted around, apparently when it starts up it chooses any IP address in the network starting at 192.168.1.1, and because my Belkin Router had a default setup set to 192.168.2.1 it couldn’t find itself.

So setting the Router to 192.168.1.1 meant the NAS drive could then work more happily with the router, picking the next obvious IP down the line, being 192.168.1.2

Finding it’s IP then was dead easy, accessed the Router by typing…

http://192.168.1.1

Then logging in, navigating in the menubar, clicking ‘DHCP Client List’. From there it listed all the devices currently connected to the Router, one was my MacBook, the other the NAS drive.

So using that I accessed the NAS drive with…

http://192.168.1.2

Logged in and then set it to use a particular IP all the time so I could always find it.

Then used the above commands in Finder to hookup the drive to my MacBook.

Job Done!

If you’re one of those guys with a hacked iPhone, you might get this error with the InstallerApp, nothing serious, just one of the repositories has changed location.

New Repository Location

• Go to Sources in Installer.app.
• Tap the Edit button. Click on the - icon over Ste Packaging source line to delete it.
• Tap the Add button and type the right new URL for STE Packaging source:
• Type in the new location.. http://repo.smxy.org/iphone-apps/

Getting Extra Space on your iPhone

PS, It’s recommend you install both Community Sources and BossTool (in the Utilities category) and run the Free Disk Space tool inside BossTool in order to relocate Fonts, Ringtones and Applications to the main disk partition and thus, be able to install a lot more applications without space problems.

Note: do this in the recommended order;

• first Fonts
• then Ringtones
• and Applications at the last

As always, be careful with this; haven’t done it myself btw.

Update

Just ran the BossTool on my iphone (1.1.4) and it worked fine, did each in order fonts, then ringtones, then apps.

Also try using ZiPhone to update and unlock your iphone, you should get the new sources in the installer automatically with it.

• ZiPhone

With the inception of Sun OS 11 has come the much hoped ‘dream’ file system, the Zettabyte File System.

This wonder offers the ability to self-heal files, repair file corruption transparently, resize partitions on-the-fly, hot-swappable, RAID built-in and dynamic encryption. A real swiss army knife for file storage.

It also protected the files of billions when the Joyent service StrongSpace went down (now back up), thankfully data was kept under ZFS so it was all safely protected and restored without loss.

Apple are saying they’ll have the ZFS file-system available with a future update (maybe 10.5.2) but if you’re not scared of delving into the terminal then try installing it for yourself.

Remember this is all Alpha so not fully finalized but workable to use.

Installing the Binaries

first off, get these from…

• ZFS Binaries - Intel Leopard

once downloaded, go into the Terminal and navigate to the unzipped directory, you should see a ‘build’ directory in there.

Now to add them to your O/S, run…

sudo cp build/Release/zfs /usr/sbin/zfs
sudo cp build/Release/zpool /usr/sbin/zpool
sudo cp build/Release/libzfs.dylib /usr/lib/libzfs.dylib

Now we need to destroy any existing builds of ZFS on your machine, if existing…

sudo /bin/rm -rf /System/Library/Filesystems/zfs.fs /System/Library/Extensions/zfs.kext
sudo cp -R build/Release/zfs.fs /System/Library/Filesystems/zfs.fs
sudo cp -R build/Release/zfs.kext /System/Library/Extensions/zfs.kext

Great, now navigate to the copied files locations and make sure they have ROOT WHEEL access via…

ls -la [dir / filename]
ls -la zpool

You should see in there a column for ‘ROOT WHEEL’, if it’s the case with all six areas your set.

Reboot and you’ll be ready to start.

Building a ZFS Memory Stick

Now for this experiment I’ll convert my memory stick over to using the ZFS file system.

So first off, fire up Terminal again and type…

diskutil list

This will list all disks available to the system, so in this case my 8gb stick has it’s disk called : /dev/disk1

So I partition it with ZFS doing…

diskutil partitiondisk /dev/disk1 GPTFormat ZFS %noformat% 100%

Then create a simple spool for it..

zpool create stick /dev/disk1s2

…note the previous command will list the disks within this ZFS drive, one of them will be our 8GB partition, hence /dev/disk1s2.

…and stick will be the name of our new ZFS disk drive.

Next up we’ll need to upgrade the ZFS spool, as by default the current build will create using version 6 for backwards compatibility of the ZFS structure so we’ll upgrade it to 8 doing…

zpool upgrade

Excellent, now before you start dragging and dropping into the new stick drive on your desktop let’s set some permissions so you don’t have to authorise every file action.

So in the desktop, select the stick drive and press Option+J to see it’s disk options.

On the bottom of the popup you’ll see ‘Permissions’, click the padlock icon to unlock these, type in your system password and set the System and Wheel to both have R/W access.

Excellent, now you can drag & drop, delete files from the ZFS disk as if it was a normal disk drive.

Ejecting the ZFS Stick

Before you pull your USB stick out of your computer and cause a panic error, make sure to run this command to eject the drive.

sudo zpool export -f stick

Replace ‘stick’ with the name of your ZTS spool drive.

Deleting Trash from my Stick

There’s bug in the current build so clearing your trash on a ZFS drive isn’t exactly easy, so back in Terminal…

cd /volumes/stick

And now find the .Trashes directory with..

ls -la

Now delete the .Trashes directory to clear your trash,

rm -rf .Trashes

Bingo, job done.

Closing Points

Because of how the way our simple ZFS drive is structured, it performs lazy writes much like a usb drive in Windows; the user gets told the file has been commited but really it’s waiting around to action.

By forcing a zpool export you are essentially telling the ZFS spool to finish any pending operations and eject the drive safely.

Some time in the future this’ll be a much simpler process but for now it’s pretty decent having this file system available to keep your files safe.

Looking forward to the final release.