[Discussion] Thinking of going IMAC

[Mark Brueggemann]

--- On Wed, 12/2/09, dushanm at spinn.net <dushanm at spinn.net> wrote:

> I did that about three years ago, and found it much more 
> work than I had anticipated.

Wow Dushan, you don't paint a very rosy picture of the Mac.

I'm going through OS woes myself.  I can't seem to get there 
from here.

I've got two doze desktops, my dual boot eCs/linux desktop, triple 
boot Thinkpad (doze/eCs/linux), and a linux server box.

The intent is to have everything connect to the linux machine
as a file and print server.  It's been a real eye opener.

The server is a Red Hat based system put out by an outfit
called Clark Connect.  Gives you all the basic services you
need in a no-frills simple install.  I'm running it on a "real" 
HP server box.  Boxes are all connected up with a Linksys wifi 
hub.  Wifi is for the laptop.

Hardware wise everything seems to work fine.  Can't seem
to find a common ground with the protocols though.

The server box is currently configured as a Samba server
for both public shares and print server.  That's when I discovered
the Samba in eCs is old, and the new one I tried  (netlabs?)
didn't work.  It can see the shares but won't open them. Need to 
see if I can at least FTP with eCS and skip printing for now.

Windoze of course can see, read and write the shares just
fine, and print perfectly.

Linux is a real pill.  I've tried half a dozen distributions and only
one so far works with the server 100%.  My linux mentor says
I need to read up on Samba.  The man page for that is only about
200 pages long.  I guess I'm not a true linux believer, since I 
expect basic services to work out of the box. 

Seems like NFS might be an option for Linux and eCS but there's
no client built into windoze for that, and would still leave me to 
solve networking the printer. 

My goal of having one file/print bucket for all my machines is
quickly turning to crap.  The more I dork with this stuff the
better it looks to chuck the whole mess and put my data on
thumb drives.

The Mac theme to this post is I'd be happy to go proprietary
if it meant I could plug and play, but even with apple there's
no guarantees other than how much it will cost you.  I need
at least one doze and one linux machine no matter what, so
with a mixed bag like this it appears there's no simple solution.
You'd think as the technology moved forward it would become
more seamless and integrated but I'm finding it's just the 
opposite.

Makes me long for the days of Warp 4 and my simple peer
network, which worked like a hose.


Mark B.
Albuquerque, NM