mac – Nosce Te Ipsum

Serial Emulator under Mac OS X

October 31, 2011
by Muhammad

using a FTDI USB to Serial chip adapter and trying to find a good serial emu. for Mac OS X I found this great tip to find out the device which gets installed when you plug your USB-Serial adapter in your Mac and how to use the built in program screen with it:

First, open Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal). Next, type

ls /dev/tty.*

to get a list of your serial lines. Pick the one that you want to open. For example, my list looks like this:

gf:dev gf$ ls -al tty.*
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 18, 4 Jan 25 07:32 tty.Bluetooth-Modem
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 18, 8 Jan 25 07:32 tty.Bluetooth-PDA-Sync
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 18, 10 Jan 25 09:20 tty.PL2303-0000103D
crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 18, 0 Jan 25 07:32 tty.SerialPort-1
gf:dev gf$

And I know /dev/tty.PL2303-0000103D is the USB-to-serial adaptor becuase it’s connected, if you unplug it the tty.PL2303-0000103D stops being listed.

Knowing the serial port, you can just type screen portname datarate to show the serial data on the screen. In my case, it was:

screen /dev/tty.PL2303-0000103D 9600

To quit the screen app, type control-A, then control-\.

from a post by Greg Ferro

General Unix

Installing Linux on MacIntel

March 10, 2011March 24, 2011
by Muhammad

This can be a challenging process depending on which distro you are installing. The challenge comes from the fact that Mac’s uses EFI (old PPC ones use Open Firmware) instead of old fashion BIOS. I spent some time getting Debian Squeeze onto a Mac Pro and in the process found some information which is listed below:

– All of the install process for any linux distro is same as for any box. The only part where it gets difficult is partition and boot loader. If your distro install does not let you perform manual partition and let you choose the boot loader as well as where it installs then you need to choose Expert Install when booting from the installation media.

– You should also get hold of rEFIt either on a USB or CD. You will need it later. There are various other ways I found but using rEFIt was easy and quick.

In my experience (Debian Squeeze) no matter how I tried GRUB boot loader gave issues. Even rEFIt complained. There is a way of using a MAC OS X install CD to bless the Linux partition but using LILO was easy. If you want to use Bless command it is as follows:
$ sudo bless --mount /efi --setBoot --file /efi/efi/refit/refit.efi --labelfile /efi/efi/refit/refit.vollabel
considering the partition on which you copy rEFIt files is mounted as /efi
There is a guide if you want to follow this at:
http://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/MacBookAir/squeeze

During the installation if you want to clean the MBR use the following commands to remove all bootloaders from MBR
use dd command from a shell (it removes partition table as well): # dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1
Just remove MBR, without the partition table: # dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sdX bs=446 count=1

What I did was to start expert install, create first partition of max. 100MB with FAT16 system and tag it as “do not mount”. Then the second partition will be of max. 500MB with ext2 or ext3, mount will be /boot and tag it bootable. Now create a swap and then root where everything else is mounted. After basic OS and then software install when it comes to bootloader install Lilo (elilo failed to install) and got it written to the MBR. Finish the installation and Mac will reboot. Boot with rEFIt CD and choose to start the partition created (2nd icon from left on the bottom line – one just right to the shell icon). It should not report any error, will you to MBR before and after the change and will request your permission to make the change. Allow it and reboot. Voila… Lilo should boot your Linux after about 10-15 seconds wait on the first white screen.

Apple OSX

Wireshark on MAC

June 3, 2010
by Muhammad

Wireshark under MAC uses X-11 to run and on BSD-flavored systems, such as OS X, libpcap opens a BPF device to do a capture. You’d need to make the BPF devices on your system readable by you in order to capture (you could also run Wireshark as root, but that’s overkill, and runs a rather large chunk of code as root).

You could do

sudo chown {your account name} /dev/bpf*

to do that, but that would have to be done after every reboot. To do that automatically, you could install the ChmodBPF startup item from recent versions of libpcap on your system in /Library/StartupItems and edit the commands in the StartService() shell function in ChmodBPF/ChmodBPF to do the appropriate chown and possibly chmod commands.

Apple OSX

Apple Handy Guide

May 24, 2010May 28, 2010
by Muhammad

#restart apache server on Apple
sudo /usr/sbin/apachectl restart

#restart amavis
sudo /bin/launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.amavis.amavisd.plist
sudo /bin/launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.amavis.amavisd.plist

# postfix
sudo postfix reload
or if you want master to reload
sudo /bin/launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist
sudo /bin/launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist

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Tag: mac

Serial Emulator under Mac OS X

Installing Linux on MacIntel

Wireshark on MAC

Apple Handy Guide