Technology

GPRS dial up networking on Mac OS X – Solved !

Standard

After a huge pain and lot of time on getting GPRS dial-up Internet connection on Mac OS X with Sony Erricsson D750i from T-Mobile, it works!!! The trick is:

  1. Download SonyEricsson modem sripts from Ross Barkman’s page.
  2. Don’t use pre-defined settings, but create your own data account for Internet access. Of course you can use a configurator from T-Mobile.
  3. Use Sony Ericsson GPRS modem script with CID corresponding to newly created data accountD.
  4. Put internet.t-mobile.cz instead of phone number.
  5. And last but not least … use username and password (gprs/gprs) regardless T-Mobile’s instructions of authentication being not required.

Gentoo discoveries

Standard

I made myself to do regular maintenance of our moucha.cc node :) yesterday. I started do the usual stuff – unused package removal, inactive user removal, system update etc. and while doing it I found two tools for Gentoo linux which improved maintenance speed and effectivity.

Portage support for CDB improves greatly the speed of working with portage data – cache updates, searching etc. Howto set it up is on Gentoo Wiki.

The other tool is called “dep” and solves a lot of problems with package dependencies – reverse dependencies, unused version in slots, cleaning duplicates from world file etc. Check it out here: http://catmur.co.uk/~ed/main/my-bin/dep. Unfortunately it doesn’t work on my desktop sytem, because weird error with sed :( Hope I manage to get it working …

And btw … after some time of doing other things than system administration as main job, I found it quite enjoying to get into it again.

Taste of Apple

Standard

I always liked Apple computers. Not really always, but definitely since first iMac. But my experience with them was almost zero as I only used ancient Powerbook in 2002 while writing my thesis. Since then I used Macs just for testing Appletalk file sharing in our upcoming product.

I had to choose my new notebook a few weeks ago … and as I always wonder if Mac OS X is really something great or is just hype, I decided to give it a try. It probably would be better to wait for new PowerBooks as they might use new Intel chips, but I had to decide now, so I choose PowerBook 12″.

The hardware is more than OK – I love the design, specs are for my “office” type work good too, so the main question which remained is: “What can the software offer to a long time linux user ?” And the answer is of course not so easy. I thought it would be much better to use it for a longer time to overcome first troubles, so …

Pros

  • Eye candy – Aqua user interface with all those hardware accelerated OpenGL effects is really gorgeous.
  • Spotlight – Spotlight search rules!
  • User friendliness – Tiger has a lot of small things which make everyday usage much easier and quicker.
  • Easy application management – “Drag & drop the icon to your Applications folder” is the ultimate simple and idiotproof concept.
  • Unix – It’s Unix under the hood, so there is always the Unix way … terminal, bash and vi :)

Cons

  • Stupid keyboard shortcuts – Don’t really understand, why there are not possible shortcuts like CTRL+Enter or Shift+Apple etc. and there are really weird ones instead (Shift+Apple+D to send mail ?!).
  • Broken OpenOffice.org – This is really thing that pisses me off and makes me constantly think of returning back to Linux: There is no native OpenOffice. It uses X11, but something is broken here, because I’m not able write national characters, because of dead key does not work. And all my documents are written in OpenDocument or StarOffice formats … damn.
  • Few resources – I used to use a lot of web resources forums, wikis, mailing lists etc. to find out the answers. I wasn’t able to find such resources for Macs, especially in czech.
  • And last but not least it is not free software!!!

Mandatory screenshot will come later …