$ uptime
20:20:56 up 434 days, 15:31, 2 users, load average: 2.32, 0.89, 0.53

What’s a beta book? Well in this case it’s a lot like software—feature complete and ready for you to give it a spin.

The announcement from the Pragmatic Bookshelf:
The Pragmatic Bookshelf | Desktop GIS
“From Google Maps to iPhone apps, geographic data and visualization is quickly becoming a standard part of life. Desktop GIS shows you how to assemble and use an Open Source GIS toolkit. You’ll find strategies for choosing a platform, selecting the right tools, integration, managing change, and getting support. You’ll get a good introduction to using the many tools available so you can visualize, digitize, and analyze your own mapping data.”

I found myself wanting to print something and, based on my last experience, prepared for the ordeal of setting up a printer. I about fell out of the chair when I opened the Printer configuration and found that the Eee had already found the CUPS printer on my network and added it. Hit print and it works. Nice.

Enter Leopard. I upgraded my machine rather than a clean install — I’m in the middle of too many things to start from zero. Being cautious, I waited a few days to see what kind of issues might arise (such as the Blue Screen of Death). For the most part, the upgrade went well, with a few exceptions:

• My crontab disappeared. Well not entirely as the crontab still existed in /var/cron/tabs, but running crontab -l showed nothing. To fix I just ran crontab -e and pasted the contents into the empty editor (Vim of course) and saved it.
• All my printer definitions disappeared. All I have is remote printers hanging off a Linux box so this was worth a bunch of fiddling around to get things working again
• AFP doesn’t work with Linux netatalk. Apparently Leopard doesn’t allow clear text passwords (a good thing) but the versions of netatalk on Ubuntu and Debian don’t support encryption. You can build it yourself, but this will break AppleTalk printing (which of course I’m using). No more AFP connections for now.
• GPG support in Apple Mail broke (requires an update from the GPGMail guys)
• After finally patching up X11 in Tiger, Apple decided to ship Leopard with X.Org rather than XFree86. A total disaster. I have nothing against X.Org — I use it on Linux — but the implementation in Leopard is rife with problems. Take a look at the Mac forums and you’ll see what I mean. While I was finally able to get an Nx session, there were scrolling problems, the yellow mouse pointer is back, and it crashed when running QGIS. I finally removed X11 and installed the XFree86 version from my Tiger disk to get things working again.

I also found a number of applications that needed to be upgraded in order to work (no surprise really). Fortunately most of the open source developers are on top of the changes needed.

Your average user probably won’t have to face these issues. If you’re a developer or heavy open source user, be aware it may take a while to sort out the issues with your upgrade. I just hope there aren’t many more surprises lurking for me under the hood…

I started off to simply repartition my Powerbook and then reinstall OS X and put Ubuntu on the new partition. That was two days ago. Things are pretty much back to normal now. I have a dual boot system that I can take with me and run my favorite GIS software on both platforms as needed.

The Ubuntu install was easy, although a bit different than on Linux. Overall it was pretty smooth, including the installation of the boot manager. Of course the downside is you can’t use the AirPort wireless in Ubuntu (or any other Linux variant) due to the proprietary nature of the Broadcom driver.

So why did it take so long? First off I copied everything off the Powerbook to an external USB drive for safe keeping. This was a slow process. Restoring things and reinstalling all the OS X applications took a while as well.

The biggest problem was getting printing to work. This may or may not have been associated with the dual boot hack, but it popped up about the same time. The printer is attached to a Linux box and in the past used Samba to provide print services to the other machines on the network. This didn’t seem to work anymore. Every print attempt from OS X resulted in “the smb process terminated unexpectedly”. Several hours later had printing reconfigured to use IPP. The only remaining problem was that jobs were not removed from the queue on the Linux box after printing completed. Right or wrong I finally changed the permissions on the /var/spool/cups directory to give group lpadmin write privileges. The cupsys daemon in turn changed the permissions and removed write from lpadmin on everything except the tmp subdirectory. This solved the problem.

Now maybe I can get back to doing something more productive…