User:Tonyr/Journal/Jul07

05Jul07

Airport Extreme
New to me: Airport Extreme cards don't 'just work' in Ubuntu. The driver is bdm43xx, but special magic is required to get the firmware from Mac OSX installed in the right place in the file system. The process is documented at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Feisty. It requires installing package bcm43xxx-fwcutter, and the documentation therein explains where to get the firmware source files from Mac OSX.

Wireless network selection
Also new to me: Kathey Sutter pointed out that when configuring the wireless interface, setting the ESSID to auto and enabling roaming mode will result in the network icon in the menu bar providing a list of detected networks to choose from.

11Jul07

iMac power button mechanical failure
Jake worked on an iMac that wouldn't power on. He discovered that the front face button was not travelling inward far enough to contact and press the interior button mechanism. Pressing the interior button directly would work, i.e. the machine would power up. We decided that something about the metal chassis area holding the interior button mechanism must have been deformed somehow, just enough to defeat the minimum tolerance required for the button assembly to work. We couldn't see exactly what kind of adjustment would be necessary to bring the whole thing back into alignment.

12Jul07

Using netwrok proxy for update
Michael said we should be using a proxy for updating software, especially if there are many updates, or if any update package is large (several megabytes). If it's only one or two small packages, it probably isn't necessary. A case in point is the Feisty OpenOffice update that appeared a couple of days ago that was over 70MB, if I remember correctly.

The FG proxy machine is proxy.fglan, and it uses port 3128 for apt updates. A way to specify this is with an entry in /etc/apt/apt.conf, which does not usually exist by default in Ubuntu. The entry looks like this:

Acquire
  {
     http::Proxy "http://proxy.fglan:3128";
     ftp::Proxy  "ftp://proxy.fglan:3128";
  }

Alternatively the lines could appear without the enclosing brackets as

Acquire::http::Proxy "http://proxy.fglan:3128";
Acquire::ftp::Proxy  "ftp://proxy.fglan:3128";

I'm not sure the ftp line is necessary, but it appears in all the examples I saw. Synaptic has a proxy configuration option in it's own Settings->Preferences menu, but the settings file only shows up in /root/.synaptic aas far as I can tell, and wouldn't extend back to cover apt in general. I think that /etc/apt/apt.conf applioes to every utility that uses apt.

What this means for the MacBuild process is that /etc/apt/apt.conf will need to be created before the update is done, and removed after it is finished. This may perhaps be automated in the cloning process by doing a chroot to the target installation partition/directory and invoking aptitude dist-upgrade. This calls for an experiment.

13Jul07

That proxy business
Well, Martin has put in place something called Transparent Proxy, making all that proxy stuff in yesterday's post unnecessary. So it goes.

14jul07

Pricing
According th the store price list, the difference between the hd/mem configurations 40/512 and 20/256 is $25 ($20 from mem, $5 from hd).

Yaboot options
The FreekBoxen boot option for new user creation is implemented as a script in run level 3, one of the otherwise unused Debian run levels (run level 2 is multi-user by convention, levels 3-5 default to multi-user). The script uses the oem-config script provided by the oem installation option. MacBuild should implement both of these practices (oem installation and new user boot option).