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My Home machines.

Contents

My Mac Mini OS X 10.4 (tiger).

Well I have to work from home quite abit so as well as the Apple IBook that I have work has now also provided an Apple Mac Mini for use there. I do have to say that the machine is really good, its a high end one and fits straight into the home network.

Anyway it's quite a nice little machine, I really don't like Office 2004 too much but in order to use the same WP/Spreadsheet software as other people it's nessesary. In fact the machine is pretty excellent as a terminal to the unix machines because it also running X11 very well. Oe thing I have changed is that I prefer to use firefox than safari - overall I am very pleased with the machine.

My main Linux workstation Linux.

Well I can't live without my Linux so back to the alleys of Taipei again and time to start build a cheap computer part II.
This is it so far:

The only OS installed on this machine is RedHat Fedora Core 1 with the KDE/Bluecurve desktop, and for the office software I am using Openoffice. I have to say that this really works excellently, since the arrival of the Mac notebook and mini's it has more or less migrated into being a server for the house now. This is a task in which it excels.

The Samsung laser printer is 600dpi and 14ppm, it does not come with a Mac driver but does come with a Linux one, since this is used mainly for printing from both my and my wife's Mac Mini + my ibook I hooked the ml-1520 onto the Linux box and set it as a shared printer. Cups on the Linux box takes care of everything and the Mac's are set to use IPP to print to the printer queue on the Linux using a 'raw' printer driver. All worked fine until we tried to print some Chinese stuff from the Macs then it all went pear shaped for a bit.

Printing to an Samsung ML-1520 attached to a Linux box from OS X the solution: 

Okay first thing was to use the Samsung Linux drivers downloaded from the Indian Samsung site and to get the Linux side working. So far so so good, then on the Macs we used the print manager to setup a print queue which spools to the ml-1520 print queue on the Linux box. The next step was to then remove the ppd file from the /etc/cups/ppds directory on the Macs to ensure that the Macs did not preprocess the documents and instead sent a 'raw pdf' to the Linux box. On the Macs /etc/cups/prints.conf was also edited so that it became ipp://IP_ADD/printers/ml1520 instead of ipp://IP_ADD/ipp/ml1520. The next step was then on the Linux side becasue the copy of pdftops that came with cups did not support 'Chienese pdfs'. To get around this I noticed that the newer versions of cups use a wrapper called pdftops.pl to call the xpdf version instead of providing its own version of this utility. The first step is to replace /etc/xpdfrc with a copy of /etc/xpdfrc.zh_tw to enable xpdf to use Chinese fonts. Then I next to downloaded a copy of pdftops.pl to /usr/lib/cups/filter and edited the  /etc/cups/mine.convs file to use the perl script instead of the orginal program. Some minor edits were needed on pdftops.pl to point to the correct place for the xpdf version of pdftops. Finally a symlink from /etc/xpdfrc to /etc/cups/pdftops.conf was installed and all was ready for use.

My Wife's Mac Mini OS X 10.4 (tiger).

My wife has now caught the apple bug and bought herself a Mac Mini as well - also linked via DVI with a Mozo G705S monitor, the spec is not as high as the work bought one that  I picked up but is still a very nice machine, it has a Combo drive and 1.25Mhz cpu and 512Mb of memory but other than that (and wired keyb/mouse) it is the same as mine - she seems very very happy with it!

Last update: Sat Oct 1 10:18:25 CST 2011 Comments to: jon _at_ sinica.edu.tw
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