Went back to Maplin Electronics yesterday and got an Mapower enclosure. It’s new so isn’t in the catalogue yet but it has an Oxford 911 chipset for the firewire side of things. It works with the mac just fine and even lets you boot from it using Alt to select a boot disk.
Month: January 2005
Fedora PPC
Well, I’ve had my powerbook for almost a year now and although OSX is nice enough, at times I try to compile applications (as in download source, ./configure, make, make install) and it just will not compile.
Figured I’d try Fedora PPC (core 3) and although it’s not fully ready guessed I could live with a few minor bugs here and there… well, I was wrong.
Firewire drive enclosure issues
It seems not all firewire drive enclosures are equal. Those with an Oxford 911 chipset apparently work properly with OSX and you can boot off them. The one I got today from Maplin was unfortunately not an Oxford chipset but a Prolific PL3507. It works ok in so far as it mounts the disk in OSX but trying to boot from it doesn’t work – it just hangs and doesn’t find it. Time to find a different one.
Mac mini
Those new macs that were announced during the latest Expo in SF are just so cool!
The Mac mini – G4 processor, up to a Gb of RAM, 40 or 80Gb disk and as many connections as a 15″ Powerbook. Firewire 800, firewire 400, USB 2.0, ethernet and modem, with an optional Airport Extreme and/or bluetooth card.
The problem with holidays…
The biggest problem with having a holiday and not really going out much is that my body clock tends to get all screwed up. Wake at 12pm (lunchtime) and go to bed at 4am.. wouldn’t be so bad except I have work on Tuesday. I guess I should go to bed now.
Annoyances
I’ve been meaning to write this entry for a while but never quite got around to it. It’s probably not all that interesting, but I really want to write it because then maybe when one of these things happens, I’ll stop thinking “Must complain about that (to no-one in particular)”
User Mode Linux
I’ve just spent the best part of 9 hours installing a Fedora Core 3 User Mode Linux (UML) filesystem and configuring it so that it works. It’s been a learning experience for sure, but once I’ve backed up the virtual disks, I can play around with various things like apache2/mod_perl2 without breaking any existing servers and if it all goes horribly wrong, I can just restore the disk back to how it was.
Happy New Year!
It’s 2005. Happy New Year to everyone. Not much to report except that I spent a quiet night in front of the computer experimenting with mod_perl examples from my new practical mod_perl book (see entry about Christmas).