Back to nerddom

As I used to work in IT, I liked to have an easy setup for the systems I use at home. While I was still considering to return to earning money with my nerd skills, I even ran my own web server as kind of a showpiece, but that times have long gone.

My preference for Mac systems remained until recently. For a long time of my life, these systems offered simply the most trouble free solutions for my sometimes exquisite demands. However, as I reduced my consumerist ways drastically, and don't like the idea to spend money every so often to get a decent system, I needed alternatives.

I hesitated for a long time to go the Intel way - but some years ago, when my PowerPC based MacBook went into a HDD nirvana, I got myself a shiny Macbook, and got even a free iPod touch on top of the deal.

For quite some time this remained a relatively satisfying solution. You get OpenOffice, I didn't mind to shell out some money for Photoshop elements, and what I wanted to do on a computer works out in satisfying speed. After all, no longer professionally working in IT, I had only little comparison to other systems, so things looked fine.

My preference for multi-tasking brought performance to a limit though. At some point, I let go of the familiar Firefox, and switched to Chromium, with lots of google integration which seemed to make life easier from a user perspective. However, lately I got pretty annoyed about the frequent stalls, not only with Chrome, but also with the entire system.

Depending on how many things ran in parallel, the system just denied me even switching application without either the rainbow, or no reaction at all. As I got myself a Windows based laptop for some other task, which now mainly runs on Ubuntu, I considered upgrading my Macbook to Ubuntu as well.

That was about four days ago, and I still struggle to get it working. Doh. Of course, there's plenty of information on the interwebs how to do it, yet many contradicting information, and the Mac idiosyncratic hardware doesn't really simplify things.

Ubuntu offers to try the system before installing, and as burning a bootable CD doesn't cause any problems, I had a quite satisfying taste of linux booted off CD. As I didn't want to make a complete switch before knowing I could still use all of images. music and other documents, I wanted to go down the dual boot route, or maybe just having a small linux on an usb stick before loosing all the data on my internal disk, which spoiled my fun with the Macbook I had before.

So far, after some four days of intense hacking, numerous reboot and installation attempts, I only learned some valuable lessons, without yet succeeding in setting up a workable Ubuntu installation. Luckily, I remembered some valuable ideas from my times as professional unix nerd, which so far prevented from losing my music, documents and images I gathered over the last few years/ Phew.

I just finished the second restore of the internal hard disk, so if you go for the adventure of installing Linux on a box that has already some valuable data/setup, here's the first important hint:
Clone your original disk with something Carbon Copy Cloner!

Luckily I had a big external USB with lots of stuff, but still sufficient space available, so before I started doctoring with the single partition of the internal disk, I made a clone that saved my ass already twice. I couldn't resize the disk - it was probably too cluttered after some years of use. To create a second partition, I needed to clone the system, delete all contents, create a second partition, and restore the original system.

I learned heaps of the boot process as well, which differs quite a bit between Apple and PC systems. PCs use traditionally BIOS booting, while my and all newer Macs use a method called EFI. These methods don't mix too well, although its possible to have the Mac emulating a BIOS to install Linux (and Windows as well). I forgot already what a default Ubuntu installation would do, as most description suggest a manual partitioning setup.

Each disk has a Master Boot Record (MBR), which you want to preserve for a dual boot system. I learned the hard way that installing a MBR onto the disk itself doesn't work well. MacOS still started, but appeared a bit sluggish, but more important, I couldn't get Linux to boot. Second highly important hint:
Don't install the MBR onto the disk, but in a dedicated small partition!

While from MacOS 10.7 onwards BootCamp offers a multiboot capability, mainly to run Windows parallel, the best solution seems a tool named rEFIt. I didn't manage to start the installation from USB stick without it, yet with it things started working out fine. That was the tool that enabled me to find out that I screwed up the MBR of my disk - after installing Linux two penguins appeared in the boot menu, none of which swam to the shores of a booting system.

After the second time I reinstalled my Mac from the clone, things started working out really well. I could use the USB stick for installation (less noisy and a bit faster than the CD installation), and finally, I could boot into a working Linux on my Mac. Hooray!

However, there's still plenty of things to sort out. My Linux partition is much smaller than the Mac part, and I want to access the files on the Mac partition (at least in read-only mode) from Linux. Though it's possible to boot Ubuntu with EFI, this needs some more doctoring. Also, the brightness control doesn't work yet. It still looks like I can now start figuring out how useful Ubuntu is while still being able to fall back to the comfort and settings of my Mac.

The aim remains to create a system which offers more privacy than MacOS. Apple has been caught lately with a lot of cooperation with the American spy authorities, and having a system that can't be spied on, and offers more Tor integration makes all the hacking worthwhile.

Raptile

This might like an unlikely blog for nerdy stuff, but then, always expect the unexpected. Maybe it's more a story about persistence than about technology, be warned though, I will mention nasty tech stuff.

Some month ago I heard about 3d printing, and got on a mad internet hunt to find out more. The reprap series took my liking, and I found someone in Adelaide that offered ready built Prusa Mendels for a reasonable price.

However, by some stroke of fate my machine arrived elsewhere, and the replacement machine came with a broken z-axis connector. The dream of plug'n'play was gone, well, I knew beforehand that setting up a print host would be enough of challenge, but instead of figuring out 'soft' problems I needed to get out spanners and screwdriver to get things back into action.

Luckily, I received a good amount of spares for the broken part, although I couldn't find too much documentation about the bits I needed to do. Some glued parts were in the way, and I didn't feel too confident in my fixing attempts. It took me literally ages to level the printer, and to dare to connect to its supposed host.

Dealing with Windows installation of Java, Python and some more bits and pieces turned into a nightmare. I relived my frustration that I experienced during my first professional exposure with Windows 1994: An orgy of badly organised system structures and confusing dialogue boxes, an utter lack of common logic, a training in obedience to the machine.

Anyway, the mechanical setup looked okay, what did I know, I never saw a 3d printer in action before. And after remembering that problem-solving with win software usually meant deleting everything and starting over, taking care each step in down in the right sequence, I got a bit further in having something like a printer interface up and running.

I think it took me only half a day to have figured out how to talk to the printer via the interface, and I could dare to see it moving. I could move x and y axis fine, I didn't understand how to move the z-axis. When I used the z-home function, disaster stroke. The side of the z-axis that had survived the transport crashed down, and without a z-stopper (which I moved out of the way without knowing what it was) the z-steppers kept spinning and spinning, until I removed power.

I waited until the next day to get the spanner and screwdriver, replaced the connector with a spare, which took quite some reaming, and had another go. However, in my attempts the night before I changed a driver setting (it's a not a nix system, it still needs to reboot to learn new things), which effectively removed the usb-to-serial driver.

Three or four reboots later I was where I was the night before: A 3d printer that seemed mechanically okay, a software talking to it, and eager to get this thing to print something. I pushed the connect button, and saw the 'start' reply from the printer controller. I spend some time moving the extruder along its axis, noticing that it was tricky to level with the print surface.

When I got ambitious and tried to print, the feeder for the extruder moved, but the temperature sensor for the hotend always showed 500 degrees, and nothing seemed to happen. I aborted printing, and played with the manual switches for hotbed and hotend, yet the mystery remained.

Then the next disaster stroke. While I tried again the homing functions, strange noises occurred while moving the y-axis, and a nut rolled underneath the printer. I was happy enough to print a model on the edge of the build platform (still haven't figured out how to move around with the print tools), and then the y-axis belt came off.

While my hope went up during the last couple of days, the number of obstacles seem to multiply. Even the small model I want to use as test needs plenty of PLA, but as yet I haven't really seen it moving at all. So while I'm relatively confident to fix the y-axis (relatively), the extruder looks like a bigger problem.

At least I had the opportunity to revise my OpenScad skills. Surely, I could use an online printing service, but I'd rather do this after fine-tuning (rapid prototyping, innit) at home. So tomorrow, it's back to some real tools, while searching the interwebs for info about hotends and temperature sensors.