Long time no post! Ho hum, been busy as ever. Anyhow, for my own benefit just wanted to write down some Mac foo I learned today. I was searching for the Mac equivalent of the Linux “eject” command. Lots of people online are spouting off about needing to reboot their macs and hold down keys to eject disks that aren’t recognised, but what you really need is: hdiutil eject /dev/disk1
Listing installed TrueType fonts in Emacs In this new fangled age of TrueType support in Emacs it’s really useful to know the names of the Monospace fonts installed on your system in the format that Emacs understands. If you are on a Linux/UNIX system running Xorg with fontconfig installed then add this function to your .emacs file (defun list-monospace-truetype-fonts () "Provide a list of available monospaced truetype fonts on this machine" (interactive) (set-buffer (get-buffer-create "Monospaced Fonts")) (call-process-shell-command "fc-list :spacing=mono:scalable=true family | sort" nil t) (setq buffer-read-only t) (switch-to-buffer-other-window (current-buffer))) You can set these fonts in a number of ways, currently I am getting the most joy using this form:...
Solaris Joy A little more solaris joy. Mainly as a note for myself here is how to setup an OpenVPN client on OpenSolaris 2008.05: Steps Add package repositories Add Blastwave and SunFreeWare IPS repositories to the Image Packaging System: -bash-2.05b# pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.sunfreeware.com:9000/ Companion -bash-2.05b# pkg set-authority -O http://blastwave.network.com:10000/ Blastwave -bash-2.05b# pkg refresh Install and setup the TUN device -bash-2.05b# pkg install IPStun -bash-2.05b# add_drv tun Install OpenVPN -bash-2.05b# pkg install IPSopenvpn … and now you’re ready to put your openvpn....
Into the Solaris So, long time no Solaris talk. I’ve not been sleeping well this last couple of weeks (ironically this seems to have a lot to do with exhausting myself during my recent trip to England), but that inevitably leads to lots of mucking around with computers in the wee hours of the morning. The need for containers So OpenSolaris 2008.05 is on my laptop right now, and it’s a bit of surprise to find it there as I am trying to hack on some code that is destined to run on Linux....
I thought this would be hard but essentially it was very easy - I guess and seemed to get it right first time. You don’t need to install CUPS as the SUNWhpijs package already supports Sun’s own print system. Simply run: /usr/sadm/admin/bin/printmgr … as root, choose PRINTER->NEW ATTACHED PRINTER from the menu and then add the printer. I found it to be attached to /dev/usb/printer0 and I had to claim it was an OfficeJet 6110, but essentially everything worked perfectly and seconds later I was printing in colour on A4 paper....
OK, so many, many people will be saying many things about project Indiana before we ever see anything concrete, and then many more people will inevitably form two camps - the “Indianaphiles” and the “Indianaphobes”. All of that is inevitable and I guess we should just enjoy the ride. However, given the scope for Indiana thus far expressed is “Make a Sun branded Solaris distribution that’s a lot more like Linux”, and that the top man is Ian Murdoch, I have exactly one wish for this project....
Another minor victory in my quest to get more familiar with OpenSolaris. I’ve upgraded to Nexenta unstable, and I noticed a package called sunwaudiohd being installed. That looked like a promising solution to the lack of audio on my OpenSolaris machine - the Intel HDA soundcard has never worked under any version I’ve used. Sadly, the mere presence of this driver didn’t seem to fix things (it’s never that simple). A little research confirmed that it was the right driver, but that this bug had been discovered....