Painting myself into a corner and working back out...

Upon leaving my friend's place in Indiana recently (see previous post) I brought back home with me an old iMac, a "blueberry", one of the blue-and-white cute cpu-and-monitor triangle shaped deals. It has a G3 processor and had a broken installation of OS 9. I recovered the important data and transferred it to a couple other media at my friend's place, then started tinkering. 

Having noticed the PPC disk in the OpenBSD distributions I decided to give it a go. Being the last to RTFM, as they say, I blithely blew away the machine's partitions and installed the usual set I'm used to with OpenBSD. The install went fine, but the machine could not be booted off the new OS at all. 

So I read. Don't delete the Mac's boot partition it says. The Mac ROM needs to see a HFS boot partition or it won't go nowhere. Drat. The first many resources I found all describe how to set up the installation presuming you knew this and presuming you were intending to make a dual-boot machine with Mac on the other side. Finally I did find a couple links which provided the clues needed about how to rectify the situation. Use pdisk to create an HFS ("Apple_HFS") partition of at least 1MB size named "boot", along with the other partitions usually used (/, swap, /tmp, /var/, /usr, /home). Then re-do the install. Then mount the OpenBSD install CD and the HD's boot partition and copy the open firmware program "ofwboot" to the "boot" partition. Finally, remove all CD's and boot with Command-option-o-f and issue the command 

boot hd:,ofwboot /bsd

Voilà, it works and I'm off and running :-)

PC Eudora to Mac Mail Conversion

I had a wonderful few days visiting friends in southern Indiana and setting up a network at their rural property where there are outbuildings used for conferences. I went with the latest D-Link b/g/n router over the Apple Airport for cost and the flexibility of a web-based configuration interface for the wireless component of the system.

We also moved over 103,000 emails from Eudora 7 on a Win XP machine to Mac Mail on a new MacBook Pro. This was a bit of a pain. Our original plan was to move to Mac Eudora 6.2 for consistency, but the Eudora help for this process was entirely inadequate, and in places just flat wrong. Eudora 6.2 for OS X still uses OS 9 line endings (CR) for some reason, rather than the LF used by all UNIX based systems. Overall Eudora 6.2 felt like an outdated OS 9 piece of software I thought. The Mail importer, however, worked reasonably well (though slow) on the Eudora message files. Multiple levels of nested mailboxes were retained.

The third-party Eudora Mailbox Cleaner did a good job with the multiple address books, but the Filter->Rules import only imported the name of the filters, not any of the content, which was disappointing.