Hardy Never Worked, So I'm Back On Gutsy

As awesome as Hardy is, I could never get those damned random freezes I mentioned in my last post to stop, so I had to default back to Gutsy.

Fortunately, there were a few things I learned about integrating with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard while fiddling with my Hardy install that are perfectly applicable in Gutsy, including screen sharing and networking with Netatalk.

Screen sharing was surprisingly easy to set up. Simply install xtightvncviewer from the repos:

sudo aptitude install xtightvncviewer

This should get make your Linux box accessible from your Leopard box, and you can also use it to control your Mac from Linux by typing into a linux terminal:

xtightvncviewer your.Mac's.IP.Here

You will likely have to enter some sort of password to gain access. There are also some command line options you can use to optimize your experience, which you can see by typing:

xtightvncviewer -help

If you plan on using screen sharing often from your Mac, you should consider adding a link to the program to your Dock. It's just a regular program located at /System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app.

On to networking:

I had previously used Samba to network my Macs with my Gutsy/Hardy box because I had always heard it was the easiest method. This simply isn't true. All it takes to get things going using Mac-native networking is to bring up a terminal and type:

sudo aptitude install netatalk

If you're on Leopard, you will run into the issue of it not liking cleartext passwords, which the Netatalk version from the Ubuntu repos happens to use. To fix this, you can either do it the hard way: by recompiling a new version of Netatalk from source with a special option enabled, or you can do it the easy way: by jumping on your Leopard machine and open up a Terminal and type (all on one line, courtesy of a commenter at macosxhints.com):

defaults write com.apple.AppleShareClient
afp_cleartext_allow -bool true

Now Leopard will happily communicate with the standard Netatalk from the repos. As a word of caution: this method is less secure than the 'hard way,' but I just needed it for my home network, so it's not a big deal to me.

If you want shares to be accessible to your Mac from your Ubuntu box, you'll have to add them to the end of the file /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default (ex. /media/sda1 at the very bottom of the file) and then restart netatalk by typing into a terminal:

sudo /etc/init.d/netatalk restart