In order to display the routing table in OSX, you can use

$ netstat -nr

Just open the Application for the first time—lots of ways to do to this, I always like to just hit Spotlight (cmd+spacebar), type the name of the app, then enter—when the application is opened, the icon will be visible in the dock. Right click the icon of the application, then choose “options”, choose “keep in dock”

The usual mic used in PC’s and headset-mic combos won’t work with the mac mini–the mac mini mic input requires line level input, meaning the mic needs to be powered. The usual mic input for PCs are mic level input (about 1 millivolt, the mic doesn’t need to be powered). Bottom line is, if you have an existing mic which has worked with your PC, chances are it won’t work on the mac mini.

There are lots of solutions for this problem, just google the term “mac mini mic” and I’m sure you won’t run out of options–there are USB mics, and for sure you will run into the iMic from Griffin; but this guide is not about the iMic, I wasn’t inclined to buy a condenser mic or the iMic simply because I use the mic on the mini just on ocassions.

As you can see from the picture above, there is my old Sony ,portable cassette recorder, it has a pretty good mic so I thought I’d give that a try—in case you are wondering, the model of this old voice recorder is TCM-150.

If you have an old voice recorder, or as one of my buddies called it–a dicta-phone–you can try to use that first on your mac mini before shelling out some money to buy a USB mic. You will also need a stereo mini-jack connector (I got mine from local hardware supply store which also sold audio peripherals, you can try going to an audio shop–just look for a mini-jack which has both male connectors at both ends). The basic idea is to plug one end of the mini-jack to the earphone socket of voice recorder, and then plug the other end of the mini-jack to mic socket of the mac mini.

The mic probably won’t be powered when in “play” mode, so you will have to press “record” for the mic to be activated–when I tried this procedure, I actually put the recorder in the “pause” position, but as long as the “record” button is depressed, the mic was still okay.

I tested the mic using Skype for mac–try calling the Skype test call to test your audio equipment.

After 2 hours of trial and error, installing drivers which are not working; I decided to try to see if Foomatic filters will have the answer–it did. Foomatic has it’s roots in UNIX, it is intended to be used with CUPS, if you have been using OSX for some time now, then you know it’s got CUPS for a printing system.

You will need to download and install some files into your Snow Leopard–don’t worry, none of the steps involved require command line acrobatics, they will download-and-double click steps.

1. Download the Ghostscript for Snow Leopard, it’s a 32mb file, after downloading has finished and it’s already mounted, double click the installer package.

2. Download Foomatic-RIP for Snow Leopard, it’s a small file, about 486kb, do the same thing as you did in Ghostscript, download and double click.

3. Download Samsung-GDI 1.816xx for OSX, same routine, download and double click the installer file.

4. Finally, plug the Samsung ML-1610 printer to your Snow Leopard, power it up, go to system preferences, select “print and fax”, then click the plus sign (+) to add a new printer. You should be able to see the ML-1610 detected as a USB printer. When you click the drop down combo box to select the printer driver, the ML-1610 should be an available choice now–select ML-1610, and now you are done.

You will need to follow the sequence as directed above. The Ghostscript should be installed first because Footmatic will look for it. Foomatic has to be installed first because the Samsung GDI installer will look for it.

I was only concerned about the Samsung ML-1610 when I searched for this procedure, but reading from the release notes of the Samsung-GDI installer, it appears that this driver can work for several other printers too, here’s the list of the all the other printers which this driver can power up.

Supported printers

The Samsung-GDI.pkg  installer includes support for 26 printers.

Generic GDI Printer
Lexmark E210
Samsung ML-200
Samsung ML-210
Samsung ML-1000
Samsung ML-1010
Samsung ML-1020
Samsung ML-1200
Samsung ML-1210
Samsung ML-1220
Samsung ML-1410
Samsung ML-1430
Samsung ML-1440
Samsung ML-1510
Samsung ML-1520
Samsung ML-1610
Samsung ML-1710
Samsung ML-1740
Samsung ML-1750
Samsung ML-2010
Samsung ML-2150
Samsung ML-2250
Samsung ML-2550
Samsung ML-4500
Samsung ML-5080
Samsung ML-6040

I actually would have not installed it, because I already have a Samba server in the LAN. However, Snow Leopard (even Leopard, probably moreso) has an unpredictable behavior when detecting Samba shares. So I decided to install an NFS share on the same Samba server–just for my mac mini and macbook; of course, if you have linux workstations and notebooks, it wouldn’t hurt to prepare them for NFS use.

To make this solution work, you need to do something on the server side. My server has the following details.

root@whitepc:~# lsb_release -a
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 9.04
Release:	9.04
Codename:	jaunty

And this is the OSX info

OSX comes with the necessary software to mount an NFS volume, so I didn’t have to do anything on that side.

Preparing the Ubuntu server for NFS

You need to get some packages. Get a terminal (xterm or gnome-terminal or aterm, whatever is your choice)

# apt get install nfs-kernel-server nfs-common portmap sysv-rc-conf

The sysv-rc-conf is just a handy utility so that I can start | stop | restart any service in my Ubuntu box, it’s a ncurses user interface which let you manage the state of services by just pointing to the service using the arrow keys, then pressing the plus sign (+) to start a service and the minus (-) sign to stop a service

After getting the packages, you will need to edit /etc/exports and add some lines so that you can expose the folders that you would like share using NFS

replace /home and /mnt/badass with your own folders that you’d like to share. I had to include the ‘insecure’ option in the exports declaration because OSX wouldn’t let me mount without that option. There are other types of declaration you can do in the exports file, but it’s beyond the scope of this post–I’ll put some more time on this one, then I’ll redo this post to include the other options for NFS exports file.

After you have done editing /etc/exports, you should restart the nfs server, you can do that 2 ways. First is by

$ sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart

The second is to invoke sysv-rc-conf from the command line, then use your arrow keys to find nfs-kernel-server, then press ‘-’ sign to stop, then press ‘+’ sign to start.

Mounting shares from OSX

Just like any other mounts, you should create a mount point (a folder) in your OSX drive.

$ mkdir ~/mymount
$ cd ~
$ sudo mount servername:/mnt/badass ~/mymount

All the contents of the shared files in your NFS server should now be accessible within the mymount folder, just cd to ~/mymount and use it as it the file system is local to your OSX.

This short note uses the dump technique for SVN.

Backup the source repository

We’ll need to create a backup of the source repository (your current repository) using svnadmin dump. Ideally, you will include this in a backup script that runs regularly–either using task manager or cron jobs. Here’s the script

$ svnadmin dump /path/to/your/svn-repository > yourbackup.dump

The dump file could be large since it will contain all the revisions (deltas) that you have made in that repository–it will even include files that you have deleted in the repo.

Moving the dump to new repository

Find a way to transfer the dump file into the newly prepared SVN server–this could be done using simple FTP, secure FTP or simply copying it using a USB disk; it’s a simple file transfer operation.

You need to create a new repository on the new server first, then load up the dump file.

$ svnadmin create /path/to/your-new-repository
$ svnadmin load /path/to/your-new-repository < /path/to/yourbackup.dump

[Optional step] If you have exposed your SVN repository using http (behind Apache), don’t forget to change the owner (chown) of the new SVN repository.

$ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your-new-repository //if you are on Debian or Ubuntu
$ sudo chown -R apache.apache /path/to/your-new-repository //if you are using CentOS or Fedora

Now, the move is complete.