Macintosh is my computer of choice, now the my Amiga is retired. I like to play games on it, surf the web and create CGI images on it. Got a computer question? E-mail Me! Mac or PC. It doesn’t matter. I work with PCs, but I OWN Macintoshes! (Actually I have 2 Macintoshs and 2 Windows 2000 systems)
Macintosh OS 10.3 in use here! Now I’m running
OS 10.3 It was a little more interesting installing OS 10.3 this time. Unfortunately I made the mistake
of installing too much on my harddrive before I installed OSX. The steps that got me in trouble were:
The problem with the setup is that OSX must be installed in the first 8GB space on the hard drive. There was already so much on the harddrive already that there wasn’t enough space in the first 8GB to install it. I didn’t want to start over so I had to reconfigure the harddrive. I purchased FWB Partition Toolkit to help me out:
Granted this was not the most ideal way to go and I’ll probably regret having only 6GB on the OSX but the partition toolkit saved me from backing up my data again.
My system is configured like this now:
Robert T. Bitgood - 12/9/03
cNet. Macintosh Software Library.
VersionTracker. Another Macintosh Software Library.
Asante Localtalk Bridge
Well, if you have ever come across any old Apple Laserwriter printers, or any old Localtalk printers or computers, and wanted to be able to use them on your Ethernet network you might like to know that it is possible with the right hardware. If you've got a hundred bucks or so, Asante has a Localtalk Bridge device that you just plug all your cable into. If you are like me though, you might have an old Macintosh computer that could serve as a software bridge. The computer would have to have both Localtalk ports and Ethernet ports.
Apple released a small control panel called "LocalTalk Bridge". The bridge computer would only need to run the operating system. I went through my stack of computers looking for one that would use the least amount of power that could run OS 8.1. I settled on a Performa 637CD. With 16Megs of RAM and a 500MB hard drive, all I needed was a Nubus Ethernet card to make my bridge. I had a little trouble with an older OS because of the compatability of old and new network software. OS 8.1 seems to perform very well in this application. Since the Bridge computer is just creating a network bridge, it doesn't need to be fast or have a lot of disk drive space of system memory for spooled files. The print monitor on the Bridge computer never gets used except if I'm printing a file from the bridge computer.
Once the operating system is installed, drop the plugin into the system folder and set the AppleTalk to use Ethernet then restart the computer. When the system comes up, all the computers on the Ethernet network should be able to see the printers on the LocalTalk network. The LocalTalk network could have several printers on it and all of them could be served by the same bridge.
What I really like about this setup is that I can use my OS X Mac to share these LocalTalk printers with my Windows computers. All I have to do is start both printer sharing and Windows sharing. Also, if I happen to come across a few more Apple Laser printers, I could create printer pool on my OS X Mac. The idea of a printer pool is that the print server can send new jobs to printers in the pool that are idle while allowing the user to be unconcerned about figuring out for themselves which printer is available. Of course all the printers in the pool will need to be the same type of printer, but that setup would come in handy for those big print jobs.
At any rate, not having to ditch "old reliable" because your new Macintosh doesn't have an AppleTalk port on it, is a pretty cool thing.
More Information here.
