Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

I’m in The Official Ubuntu Book

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I’m delighted to tell you all that The Official Ubuntu Book has been published and that my name appears in it!!!

Some time ago there was an announcement that the authors were looking for recipes and I sent one by email (mine was the technique I use to update /etc/fstab in order to be able to access all your Windoze partitions safely in Ubuntu).

Today, I’ve just received the book (as promised by the Prentice-Hall guys) by Fedex and here’s what they say:

In less that a week, we collected useful recipes from Alabama, Australia, California, England, Jamaica, Mauritius, Minnesota, the Netherlands, Paris, Quebec and Sweden.

and

Hearty thanks go to the following avid Ubuntu users for sharing their knowledge: David Bain, Alan Barnard, David Clayton, Manu Cornet, Scott Dier, Oskar Jonefors, Avinash Meetoo, Julien Rottenberg, Stephen Sandlin, David Symons, Paul van Genderen and Andrew Zajac.

And my own recipe appears on page 238 of the book.

I guess I still qualify as a Ubuntu (or more precisely Kubuntu) user as, even though my personal computer is an Apple MacBook, I have:

  • My AMD64 PC at home running the x86_64 version of Kubuntu 6.06
  • My Pentium IV PC at work running x86 Kubuntu 6.06
  • A Pentium IV-based server at work also running x86 Kubuntu 6.06
  • and one computer lab at work containing 45 Pentium IV PCs all running, once more, Kubuntu 6.06

1 Mac OS X Tiger + 48 Kubuntu 6.06 + your name in a book = joy :-)

Mac OS X Internals by Amit Singh

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Today I bought Mac OS X Internals by Amit Singh of kernelthread.com fame.

It’s a massive 1640 pages long book and Amit has been receiving rave reviews for its technical accuracy and readability.

The books covers all aspects of Mac OS X including:

  • The history of Mac OS X
  • The Mach microkernel
  • The BSD, X, Carbon, Cocoa and Java application environments
  • The PowerPC and Intel processors
  • EFI
  • System startup (launchd for instance)
  • Process and memory management
  • IPC
  • The HFS+ file system

Wish me courage :-)

Complete migration towards Mac OS X

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I’ve migrated all my data (including my documents, my photos, my music files and my mails) from my Kubuntu Linux desktop PC to my new Apple MacBook.

Here is a brief recap:

I transferred the data files using Fugu which is a SSH and SCP client.

I copied my photos (all in JPEG format) to a directory and I imported this whole directory in iPhoto. I had to recreate the directory structure I used in digiKam (i.e. by date / by event etc.) manually. It was not too tough because I had renamed all my photos to YYYY-MM-DD-#####.jpg in Linux beforehand.

I had little difficulty transfering my MP3 collection to a directory which I then imported into iTunes… only to discover that some files had not been transferred by Fugu owing to the presence of “funny” characters in their filename (things like ( or french accented characters). For those files, I had to resort to putting them into a ZIP file manually and then transfering this ZIP to the Mac using Fugu. To unzip, I needed to use the -p parameter to unzip (man unzip for more info).

And finally for the emails in Mozilla Thunderbird, I proceeded as follows:

  • Compact the emails in Thunderbird
  • Transfer the Inbox (and Sent) to the Mac using Fugu
  • Drop each onto Eudora Mailbox Cleaner which, as its name indicates, is a fantastic program to convert emails in the Mozilla Thunderbird format to Apple’s Mail format…

Migration done!