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Santa Brings iBook

My new toySanta does exist and he's come early this year to drop off my present. I've wanted a Mac for a while now and have finally been convinced after a potential project required that it work with IE 5 on the Mac. This doesn't mean I've switched, it just means I'm curious.

I've only had if for three days but so far I've been blown away. The attention to detail means a lot to a fuss-pot like me. I like things that look good and this is one beautiful machine.

One of the things that put me off buying a Mac in the past was the idea that without some guy called Dave I couldn't "talk" to Windows. What's the point of a PC not on my network! Although I was confident that I could easily get a Mac to surf web sites on port 80 I really needed to be able to share files with Window. OS X has made this possible, and with my novice skills I've managed to get Macintosh Services installed on my Windows 2000 server and the iBook connected via my Wireless network.

New SAMBA Network Connection

So now I'm surfing in the browser and sharing files with Windows, happy as Larry. What next? Obviously I want to give Notes a shot. Despite there being no Developer client I opted to download the Notes 6 Mac Client and try installing that. How do you think I got on?

New Notes 6 iconIt was with some doubt that I installed Notes on my brand spanky new Mac. How to spoil a good thing in one easy step! To my surprise I found myself being impressed initially. The new Notes 6 icon doesn't look out of place at all on the Mac. Kind of like a big dobber of a marble ;o) But what happened next isn't so impressive. While I know next to nothing about the Mac platform, I think it's reasonable that I should be able to download and install Notes! All the other apps I've downloaded seemed fairly straight-forward. Not so with Notes. I gave up as soon as I saw this:

Pernames.ntf

Damnit Notes! All I wanted to do was have a look. What is your problem!? Where exactly are you looking for this file because I can see it plain and clear. It's god-damn there, right in front of your stupid face....

I give up! Not on the Mac, just Notes. If Lotus/IBM/Iris can't be bothered to make it work why the hell should we!?

Comments

    • avatar
    • John C.
    • Sat 14 Dec 2002 21:56

    That's like saying, "I'm not gay, I'm just bi-curious" it's either one or the other.

    Just kidding, I think it's great that you want to expand and explore other platforms. As for Notes on the Mac, 6 was not the first release that had problems installing. R5 had issues too.

  1. When notes is not running try doing a search for the notes preference files located in the users/libray/preference folder and throw them away. There is one named notes.plist and one named notes preference. And then when you start notes do a new setup. This should fixed your problem, if it doesn't throw the complete notes folder away, including the prefs and reinstall.

  2. that is really weird Jake. As a first time mac user myself (i just bought a powerbook g4), notes 6 for the mac installed flawlessly. where did u download it from? could it been a bad or mangled download? oh, and if you have enough ram, try Virtual PC with WinXP. Im running designer on this laptop faster than on my Dell Inspiron 8000 P3 1.5 Ghz 1 Gig Ram :)

  3. I suppose all {Macs} of those subliminal {are} e-mails to you have finally {superior!} paid off.

    Best...

    • avatar
    • Ed W
    • Mon 16 Dec 2002 12:52

    I also recently purchased a PowerBook. I knew going in that there wasn't a designer client for the Mac. What a dissapointment given the extra effort Lotus would have had to put in to provide this to us.

    If you are thinking about trying Virtual PC, I would not bother with it yet. The current version 5.0.4 does not work well with Jaguar. I was hoping this would be my solution to the Designer issue. The performance is so bad, I have stopped using it. I still have R5 installed, and can go into designer in that.

    Other than that, I love the machine. I didn't have any problems with the R6 install either.

  4. Hi

    Does anyone know if there a pure X installer awailble? I've only been able to find a OS 9 installer. But I've found that if you need to distribute your Notes client, you can just copy the Notes folder from drive to drive.

    Cheers

  5. Torben, watch for a pure X installer in a maintenance release, hopefully soon...

  6. >the idea that without some guy called

    >Dave I couldn't "talk" to Windows

    The January 2003 issue of German MacUp magazine has a 6.x version of Miramar's PCMacLan on the CD (license key to be obtained from the mag's website). It teaches Apple-ese to Windows PCs. I tried it on Win98, and it worked nicely, exposing shares on my FAT32-HD to the Mac (which has a totally different file system concept called HFS, and where meta-info about files is stored separately in "resource forks" invisible to the Mac user).

    [Jake, do you want a copy? I could send you one, just let me know.]

    The commercial version 8.x seems to bring it's own configurator for Ghostscript, which enables you to expose your PC's local printers to the network as *postscript* printers, something very much appreciated by Mac und Unix users.

    You can also create PDFs with Ghostview (for free).

    I've installed Ghostscript independently, and also gsview, and now my printer accepts postscript printjobs. But not yet through the network.

    For this I need to get something called RedMon configgered right (how? ;=} ), that's a printer-port redirection tool.

    I've twiddled with it, and it drove me nuts: It does what it's supposed to do, but not automatically: It accepts the Mac's printjob, but leaves it as a file somewhere (!) on the PC. I can then manually load it into gsview and send it via Ghostscript to a non-postscript printer. I'd really appreciate some automation here...

    Ghostview, gsview and RedMon are freeware or shareware.

    All software described get installed on the PC, so the PC might be e.g. a file- and printserver in a Mac-dominated network. Such setups are quite often found in creative departments/advertising agencies, where they use either a Windows-Server with PCMacLan or a Linux-Server for file and print services (and centralised backup).

    • avatar
    • Hemmo
    • Thu 19 Dec 2002 01:56

    Ofcourse Santa exist and live's in Lappland Finland. Here's link to(one of)his websites.

    http://www.santaclausplaza.com/english/index.html There is also information about traditions etc. Merry Christmas to you Jake and all readers of codestore

    • avatar
    • Brandon Z
    • Tue 31 Dec 2002 09:57

    Wow it's cool to know that Ed Brill reads Codestore. (Or *is it Ed Brill? I could log in as Jeff Papows and tell about my marine exploits.)

  7. I have just downloaded the Notes client 6.54 from IBM and also an older copy that I got from my employer. It installed with no difficulty. However, I, too, get the cannot find pernames.ntf message from both versions,

    even though I can see pernames.ntf in the Data directory. Note that the error does not occur during

    installation. It occurs during launch. And Notes then

    dies with no further explanation or even an opportunity

    to tell it where the file is located.

  8. have just downloaded the Notes client 6.54 from IBM and also an older copy that I got from my employer. It installed with no difficulty. However, I, too, get the cannot find pernames.ntf message from both versions,

    even though I can see pernames.ntf in the Data directory. Note that the error does not occur during

    installation. It occurs during launch. And Notes then

    dies with no further explanation or even an opportunity

    to tell it where the file is located.

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Written by Jake Howlett on Sat 14 Dec 2002

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CodeStore is all about web development. Concentrating on Lotus Domino, ASP.NET, Flex, SharePoint and all things internet.

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