The iCab Alternative
Last month in reporting about the death of version 3 Web browsers, I neglected to mention the still-under-development German web browser, iCab. You can download a PPC or 68K version for trial purposes. Users have reported that it is faster and more RAM-efficient than the leading products, and it does not have certificate-expiration issues. It does run under System 7.5.3.
When the program is finished it will sell for $29, but you can download the free trial version now.
Errata
Last month I stated that OS 8.1 is not installable on Quadras. Actually, 8.1 is the last version of system software that is supported on '040 chips (not an older Mac that had been upgraded from an '030, however). So go ahead and get a copy of 8.1 from Sun Remarketing and upgrade your Quadra!
More on Intuit
J. Michael Burke writes,
I thought you might be interested to hear what has transpired since I last wrote to you regarding the Y2K problem with QuickBooks 4 for the Mac. You may recall that I had to give Intuit's tech support my credit card number (actually, a debit card in this case) so that they could charge me a minimum tech support fee of $40, just in case they might have to render some advice. They assured me that if the problem with the software was their fault (it was), I would not be charged a fee.
Well, a month went by, and when my bank statement arrived I saw that Intuit had indeed charged a $40 debit to my checking account. Not only was I short the $40, but I had incurred $42 in overdraft fees because of the unexpected shortage in the account.
After letting the irony of the situation sink in, I phoned the 800 number on
the bank statement and reached Intuit's direct sales department. Unfortunately, my problem didn't correspond with the sales department's job description, so they referred me to, believe it or not, technical support.
This time the call was on my dime. After 20 minutes on hold I spoke to a representative who had to place me on hold again in order to find out what she was supposed to do in this situation. After another ten minutes she came back to the phone and told me that someone from their billing department would phone me in 24 to 48 hours. That was about 264 hours ago now, so I've had even more time to fully appreciate the irony here.
Yesterday I read a letter in the March issue of Macworld in which, regarding a somewhat different matter, the writer questioned Intuit's ethics. I'm starting to wonder if others have had such not-so-great experiences with this company. I'll let you know how this turns out. I can assure you that I will continue to pursue the matter until I'm satisfied.
By the way, I believe in giving praise when it is earned. I recently switched my ISP to Teleport and I'm very, very pleased with their services. Imagine being able to reach a live tech support person on New Year's Day at no additional cost! Teleport is also hosting our chiropractic group's web site, for $20 a month with two months free if paid a year in advance, a very reasonable price indeed. I'm a novice at web site construction, but I built the site myself and Teleport's tech support was very helpful in walking me through the steps to upload it and make sure it is online. Mes complimentes au Teleport!
Sending Attachments
What the hell is AppleSingle and AppleDouble? These curious formats seem to be Mac-specific methods for encoding attachments sent via email. Well not exactly: AppleDouble is actually a form of MIME, the standard for encoding files on all platforms. But AppleDouble is preferable because the encoding splits the file into the two Mac parts, data fork and resource fork, and decodes correctly when received by Macs using any modern email program. When the same file is decoded by a Windows user, the resource fork is discarded, not being needed or understood by Windows. So open your Preferences in Eudora, go to Attachments and select AppleDouble as your default encoder.
Netscape defaults to this, and doesn't mention AppleDouble anywhere in the settings or Help info, but in a "new message" window, under the Attachment Preferences tab (the bottom one) you can click the option "Use uuencode instead of MIME for attachments." Don't, unless you have a specific reason to.
Thanks to a recent TidBITS column for this info. TidBITS is an important resource and it would be worthwhile to subscribe to the weekly e-zine they publish.
Linux on Mac
For no other reason than the hell of it, I installed, or rather I struggled to install, Linux on my G3. There is a lot of buzz about it, I have friends who use and extoll its virtues, so I scored a copy of the 1999 Q3 installation and attempted to put it on an external 1-gig drive.
I came pretty close to success. I made it through all the steps with the help of the sparse install docs on the CD, but it would not recognize the disk at startup, failing through the boot process.
I had a friend over that weekend, one of the city's top Linux for Intel experts, and we tried installing a different version: MKLinux. What a mess that was! In spite of the label declaring that it supported G3 Macs, it would not even initialize the drive properly. It would give me the most unlikely-looking command-line startup (WAY inferior to LinuxPPC) that I could not get rid of without zapping the PRAM.
So we declared that a waste and cleared all bits and pieces of MK off the HD and reattempted the LinuxPPC install. This time I initialized the external drive with DriveSetup as one volume instead of the two suggested, and let the Linux utility "pdisk" do the partitioning. It is necessary to create at least two partitions on any Linux volume: root and swap. Root is like the startup volume on MacOS, and swap is like virtual memory, except it requires a separate partition.
After a long struggle (his), finally pdisk managed to properly format the drive. We had to figure out the starting block number, and total number of blocks, for each volume, based on the print command in the Linux terminal window. Print, in this case, is simply display on screen.
Now it works. I get a choice of whether to boot into MacOS or LinuxPPC at startup. Choosing Linux I get several screens of tests, all of which must pass, then XWindows loads, a simple graphical interface.
That's where I am now. I just wanted to do it. Now to spend at least SOME time at the meetings of the Portland Linux Users Group (PLUG - 1st Thursday at Smith Hall, PSU) and others, and learn how to do a few useful things with it. This is something NONE of you reading this will probably want to do, unless you already know why you would want to. (Hobby/learning experience does count as a reason.)
You think the MacOS user base is small compared to the overall user base of personal computers? The Linux for Motorola base, compared to Linux for Intel, is even smaller. That there is a base at all is an accomplishment.
Don't worry; I will not be devoting much, if any, future column space to this. There is, after all, a Linux column elsewhere in Bits. But it indeed can be done.
Followup: The LinuxPPC site has just released a version for 2000 that makes the installation MUCH easier, supports iBooks and OS9 for boot switching, and even includes a MacOS emulator so you can run some of your Mac programs under it!
I managed to install LinuxPPC 2000 on my iBook without help; this was much easier. First and foremost, DriveSetup allows me to create Unix partitions as part of the initialization process. Since I have a USB/SCSI converter, I plugged in my external HD and copied everything from my iBook onto it. Then I rebooted from the System 8.6 CD supplied with the iBook and launched DriveSetup.
I gave the A/UX partition 1.1 gigs and the Swap partition 150 megs because they recommended twice as much swap as installed RAM. Well, I have 128 megs installed RAM but I didn't want to waste that much disk space so what the hell. I probably could have gotten away with 50 megs. The rest went to the MacOS partition. They recommend against HFS Extended because as yet there is no Linux support for that format. If you use HFS Regular, then Linux can see the MacOS partition.
Then, in order to restore everything to the iBook, I first had to reinstall the system software, then install the USB/SCSI support extensions, and then finally copy everything back, including my original System Folder. Next I tossed the active System Folder into the Trash, along with everything else it installed, replaced my old System Folder in the main window and everything else just as it was. I restarted and the old system folder took control again.
Next was to insert the LinuxPPC CD and install the BootX control panel and accompanying files. Then I launched the installer and off it went: into Linux world, installing everything as it should, with no configuration errors. It all just worked. Amazing, considering how much trouble I had before.
Now all I have to do is learn to use it. But at least I have something I can take with me to meetings of PLUG and the Mensa Linux SIG. It's going to be fun, showing it booting on a Blueberry iBook. For more info also visit the LinuxPPC.org site as well.
SETI packet times
Last month I asked for the packet times experienced by G4 owners running SETI on their machines. Patrick Lawrence of Prewitt Consulting responded with these great numbers:
G4/400 (AGP)- 6 hours, 35 mins.
G4/500 - 5 hours, 14 mins
iMac DV 400 (G3)- 10 hours, 35 mins.
Serious Symantec Screwup
The aging-but-current version of ACT 2.8, the outlining/processing application, can cause a serious glitch upon installation. I discovered this at a client's recently when installing on a new iMac running 8.6. You OS9 users pay particular attention.
The installer places the dreaded ObjectSupportLib (OSL) library file in the Extensions Folder. I had already placed a folder by that name to prevent installers in the future from putting in that obsolete library file, and sure enough, during the install I got a warning message telling me it found a folder with that name. It offered to let me delete it, or cancel the installation.
That particular library became obsolete with the move to OS8, three years ago! The code is actually incorporated in the System File. But ACT is still being sold as new! There is no excuse for this. The installer script should be able to determine which version of the OS is running and leave out OSL unless it encounters System 7, which requires it. Symantec could have rewritten the installer some time after 8 came out, since they were not interested in upgrading the application, and reissued the CD. Of course it would be nice if they would release ACT 2000, the W98 version, for us as well.
The workaround, and way to protect yourself, is to first open your Extensions folder and view by name. Type an O, and look for the offending library. If it is there, delete it immediately. If it is NOT there, create a folder called ObjectSupportLib, spelled and spaced exactly that way, and leave it there. Then if some future installer tries to put OSL in, you will get a warning because a folder cannot be replaced by a file.
In the case of ACT, I went ahead with the installation and let it delete the folder and put in the library. When it finished I did NOT restart as suggested, but Quit the installation, and immediately deleted the lib and put a folder in its place.
If you are using OS9, this is extremely important because it causes serious problems. Under 8.x you only experience regular, repeated crashes.
Creating PDF files
Some of you have asked me how to make Adobe Acrobat documents without buying the full Acrobat Writer or Distiller program (~$300). There is a shareware ($20) utility that makes simple .pdf files from your own application called PrintToPDF. It goes in your Extensions Folder and is selected in the Chooser. You have a while to try it out before you must pay for it.
No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.
email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)