Big Cat Diary

Well, Panther’s installed on my iMac now.

I had a few problems getting the automounter to work, but that was all configuration silliness on the Sun rather than on MacOS.

So, now the machine’s fully integrated on the network with NIS/YP for authentication and automounting NFS home directories.

As for the speed of operation. Well, it’s adiquate. I’m not sure I’d like to run the system on a slower machine or one with less memory (400Mhz G3, 390MB RAM). Overall, though, for a new OS on an old bit of hardware (iMac DV Summer 2000) it’s pretty impressive. Oh, and it comes with a half decent X server too! 😉

PS. (08:45am 21/11/03)
The best site i’ve found for MacOS X and NIS/NFS integration I’ve found is this one. Though I did replace their YP Makefile script with a perl script which does things a bit better under Solaris.

Acquisitions…

Yestday my copy of the Special extended DVD version of The Two Towers arrived.. so I watched it last night, admittedly skipping a few chapters which hadn’t been modified from the theatrical release so i could get to bed at a reasonable time. My impression is that it is a better film, though I can see why some of the scenes were left out, mostly due to stilted dialog and/or really bad singing. On the whole, there wasn’t that much more entishness but Faramir’s character was totally revised into something more similar to that in the book, ie. he no longer looks like a younger Boromir clone but shows his more thoughtful and measured side which is in stark releif to his brother’s impetuous manner.

This morning I stopped off at our local Apple dealer and bought MacOS X 10.3 Panther for my iMac. If I could I’d rather not use this outfit as they are totally useless organisationally but I need to use them to get educational discount. It seems that Apple are sorely let down by their distribution channels. Great products, great marketting, hopeless retail agents.