so daron found a macintosh performa 5200 and laserwriter in the dumpster at our complex the other day. we have the best dumpster in the world. well, that and the richest-fuck residents ever. people move out of this place and just throw their old stuff away, presumably to buy all new stuff in their new digs.

anyway, so i have to figure out how to use a mac. it hasn't been too bad so far. i got the printing shit figured. and i made it do all the necessary appletalk stuff. there aren't enough ports on our network infrastructure to allow it to talk to the next, but i did get netatalk going on golf. it's pretty straightforward, but i think there's a problem with binary transfer or something. i grabbed a .bin archive of an old netscape, since the machine has no web browser, put it in golf's /tmp via samba and then transferred it onto the mac via appletalk. well, somewhere along the way something blew up cause it didn't install. i tried to uncompress the archive remotely, but that didn't fly either. also there is some strange file association going on. some eWorld isp or whatever launches when i try to decompress. who knows.

so i have to decide whether i want to really learn about powerpc and the old macos (wow, that finder is something), or if i should just try to install some posix compliant operating system and let that be that. unfortunately, there seem to be a whole world of problems exclusive to the 5200 and unix. there is something called mac06 that provides some posix compliance, but it's a second kernel that isn't automatically launched which makes it slightly more trouble than i'd like if i'm gonna use the machine in a unix way -- as a print server or something.

i'm also still trying to get the next to play nicely with others. it has bsd style print spooling, etc, so it should just go with the unix machines. then share it via samba or something and that should be that.

computers...