No, this is about using two great tools, SubEthaEdit and Changes with mercurial.

Firstly, let’s look at how we can use SubEthaEdit to be the editor for commit messages.

SubEthaEdit has a command line tool, which has some useful arguments. Use man see to see them.

The first of the ones I use is -w, which waits until the file has been closed before continuing the execution of the calling program. This is a required argument, as without it your message won’t be committed properly.

The next I use is -r, which causes the application that called see to be brought to the front after closing the file. This is not completely necessary, but saves a mouse-click.

-o new-window means open the file you are planning to edit in a new window. Again, not completely necessary, and irrelevant if you don’t use tabs at all, but I find it helps me to see which file I am editing if it appears ‘new’.

-m allows you to choose a particular mode to edit the file in. I have created a handy little hgCommit mode, so this can be used. I like this idea, as it means that lines that will not be committed are easily distinguished. And you can use a different background colour, so that it’s really clear what you are doing.

Finally, -j allows a custom title addition. Again, this is just a nicety, but I use it nonetheless.

The file ~/.hgrc allows you to have settings for an editor - I find that SubEthaEdit doesn’t quite work right with crontab, so I leave the EDITOR environment variable to nano. In the [ui] section of the .hgrc file, I have a line that looks like:

editor = see -w -r -o new-window -m hgCommit -j 'Mercurial Commit Message'

My hgCommit mode can also be downloaded, if you wish: hgCommit.mode.zip.

The next hint is using Changes. You’ll probably know this, if you have read the Changes WIki, but you can use the extdiff extension of Mercurial. The bit I missed is that you can also use Changes to merge by default. I wish you could do the same for diff.

To make Changes the default merge tool, create a script at /usr/local/bin/chmerge, or somewhere similar.

All that needs to go in this file is:

#!/bin/sh

chdiff -–wait $3 $1

And ensure it is executable. Mine is also owned by root, I think.

Then, in your .hgrc, add in the following line after your editor line:

merge = /usr/local/bin/chmerge

My final hint is how to get around errors when you have a remote filesystem mounted under sshfs, and you get an untrusted user or group error when trying to perform a mercurial operation. In my case, the files in question were owned by user 1001/group 1001. I added the following to my .hgrc:

[trusted]

users = 1001

groups = 1001

I much prefer bash over other shells, not because it is necessarily better, but that it is just the one I use most of the time. I’ve got some nice systems to help me out, like using a different colour for the user@host string on each machine, so I can easily see which machine the current ssh session is actually logged into.

However, at Uni there are lots of restrictions. We can run /usr/bin/bash, but we can’t change our default shell to it. In fact, we can’t change our default shell at all, which is kinda dumb. I’ve tried all sorts of tricks, but I just can’t do it.

The next step is to have your .login, or whatever, run the shell you want. For me, this is safe-ish, since tcsh (the current default shell) executes the contents of .login, but bash doesn’t. If you are using one shell that uses a particular login or profile file, and you want to change to another which uses the same file, you might struggle, or get stuck in an infinite loop. Which is probably worse.

Just having /usr/bin/bash -login in your .login file will then cause bash to run, and execute the contents of your .profile: without the -login it won’t execute the contents of said file. But what about when you exit the bash shell, using Ctrl-D, or exit, or logout, or whatever?

If you put a logout after the /usr/bin/bash -login line will cause the original shell to logout immediately after leaving the bash shell. Which is exactly what we want.

Now, all I need to do is figure out how to get rid of the line that says : tcsh: using dumb terminal settings.

That one’s too easy. Use xterm instead of xterm-color in the Settings➞Advanced area of the Terminal Preferences:

I have all of my iTunes music stored on a local server, along with the remainder of my media files (Movies, TV series, copies of Digital Photos). This has been working pretty seamlessly, until I noticed something odd.

I knew I had some files there, but they weren’t displaying. Logging into the server using ssh, or for that matter SMB showed me the files were indeed there. But whenever I logged into the server via AFP, they don’t.

Most files do, but some of them aren’t there. But if I access the share using a parent share (/home/media, instead of /home/media/music), then the files are visible again.

I am at my wits end here!

So, why use AFP over SMB (or NFS, for that matter)?

Well, I still haven’t been able to get NFS shares to work properly from my MacBook Pro. It just sits there Connecting to nfs://poul … forever. So NFS is out. (I have configured the shares under Ubuntu, or at least, I think I have. I did use the GUI tool, which as you’ll read below, didn’t fully set up the shares for SMB either…)

As I mentioned in a previous post, if you use the GUI tool to set up Samba (SMB) shares, you also need to use the smbpasswd -a [username] command.

Finder doesn’t handle Samba shares very well. It takes an age to connect to them, and if they disconnect (ie, the network disconnects, such as when you move from one location to another, and change WiFi network; or the server restarts) you get a long Finder hang while it looks for the connection.

OS X also used to disconnect Samba shares when you went to sleep, or if you slept for a long time. (This may have been the server, I don’t know) I can reconnect to an AFS share almost immediately. This means I can wake my MacBook Pro from sleep, wait a few seconds while it reconnects to the Airport network, and then press play on iTunes. All of my music lives on an AFP share, but it started playing immediately.

It is little things like this that make computing nice again.

Basically, the plain netatalk that comes with Ubuntu, due to licensing reasons, does not include SSL support, which means only plaintext password authentication is supported. That wouldn’t be too bad for my purposes (I’m running on a secure network), but OS X complains each time you try to connect using plaintext only passwords.

So, I followed the instructions from coderspiel: A year of plaintext AFP passwords is enough, but it wouldn’t work.

Firstly, it needs BerkelyDB 4+, but will uninstall this to install 3+, which the package manager thinks it needs. Stupid.

Secondly, some bits and pieces won’t compile. I did do some editing, but I felt this may break the whole thing, so I didn’t want to install the whole lot, just the missing uams. Basically, uams_dhx.so was missing.

So, I built this, and others, and installed them. Still no joy. I did kind of get uams_randomnum.so or something to work, but it kept saying incorrect password.

Then, I stumbled on the idea to use tail -f /var/lov/syslog. This immediately showed me I was missing the symlink from uams_dhx_passwd.so to uams_dhx.so

So that’s all there was to it. Now connections work perfectly. And AFP connections seem to be a bit more robustly handled (ie, less spinning beachballs of death), and faster for things like iTunes.

After finally getting that working, I did also get AFP sharing working. Which does appear to just use the users.

Still, I need to keep SMB going, for the Windows/Xbox machines that sometimes visit my network…

Perhaps, to put things in perspective, I’ll discuss exactly what it is that I want. I have a Dell mini tower machine, with nearly a terabyte of hard disk drives, 1.5Gb of memory and some other various hardware that I want to set up as a fileserver, fax and print server and scanner server for my local network, and possibly an outside accessible web server. I also want to run a virtualisation of WindowsXP, accessible via a remote desktop setup, so that Jaq can run her CAD software (Windows only) from her PPC iMac.

This should have been easy. It started with hassles even getting the 3.2Gb Fedora DVD image. I would up having to get it at work, as my wget client decided to do strange shit with sizes, and kept saying there were a negative number of bytes remaining. Granted, this is not the fault of Fedora, but it set the tone.

Next up was my installation woes. Now, I’ve installed a text-only Linux onto my NSLU2, and administered it for ages. I’ve read several books in the past about X-windowing (and even had a working Xwindows setup on BeOS/PPC, which was not a bad triumph). But I wasn’t ready for the almost never-ending hassle I had to get my Dell machine to actually boot into Fedora. But finally it did.

I’d downloaded vmware and Parallels, since I still haven’t chosen between them in the Desktop realm, so most definitely haven’t decided on this untested platform. And neither of them would work. Apparently I don’t have a kernel they like, and I can’t build the vmmon for my kernel, since I get all sorts of weird errors when I try to compile or link. Now, let me suffix that by saying when I was deeply into hacking BeOS/PPC, they had already moved to Intel CPUs, and most software I had to build from source, and generally fiddle with stacks to get it to compile and link. So, I’m not totally clueless there either.

So I spent a while trying to get the in-built virtualisation system to work. It starts installing, but for some reason I get bizarre errors on the installation of Windows - that it can’t find a file, and I can’t get it to access the CD drive again. It’s fairly crap, in other words. Especially after playing with vmware Fusion and Parallels Desktop for Mac. Both of which install Windows XP without a hitch.

Giving up on trying to survive on this Fedora, I’m currently downloading an older version of Linux - Ubuntu 6.0.6 this time. This is supported under VMWare, but not under Parallels. The only versions of Linux that are supported by both virtualisation systems are RedHat and SuSe, which don’t seem to be freely downloadable. Or maybe I just didn’t look hard enough.

But this is not the end of my story. Tracking back a couple of steps, I have been fiddling lots with Fedora. It seems okay, but it is really hard to do the things I want to do. For instance, it would be nice to VNC into the box and do stuff, but I can’t seem to make Chicken of the VNC connect. Nor the little java VncViewer I found provided superior performance.

I’d also like to be able to use other types of file sharing setup - perhaps AFP or NFS rather than just SMB. I can get an SMB connection to Fedora, but nothing else. NFS appears to just keep trying, and eventually time out. AFP connections are just rejected.

And the frustrating thing is there is no easily discoverable way to turn this stuff on. I’ve even fiddled with files I know are used for this type of thing (that’s how I got Samba going, before I discovered the place to do this). Even SWAT, which the system told me I have installed, doesn’t seem to respond on port 901, where it lives.

I know that Linux is different to OS X, and to Windows, but right now I’m not liking it a whole lot. I’d be fairly tempted to just reinstall Windows, but the two 250G hard drives that are in there are already formatted ext3fs, and mostly full of data, since they were in use, in addition to a 160GB drive that still stores my music, connected to the NSLU2. Which, I might add, was much easier to administer than Fedora. I know I’m trying to do more on Fedora, but I’m currently achieving less.

Perhaps I just need to sleep.

This was funny when I first started this download, as it reported a negative number of bytes to go, but after crossing the 2G threshold in downloads, it now reports a true value of the file size remaining.

Shoulder Holster • Morcheeba • Big Calm ★★

(via joe boy)

This is very frustrating.