This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Rick DeNatale. Original Post: The Roar of the Lion, and of "Open" Source Developers Feed Title: Talk Like A Duck Feed URL: http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/articles.atom Feed Description: Musings on Ruby, Rails, and other topics by an experienced object technologist. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Rick DeNatale Latest Posts From Talk Like A Duck

I took the plunge this weekend, and installed Lion on my personal MacBook Pro.

First I made sure I had a bootable backup of my Snow Leopard install. Then I jumped in and pressed the continue button in the Lion installer.

All in all it went rather smoothly. Only one real problem, which I managed to fix, see below.

Lion for the Ruby/Rails developer

When I installed Snow Leopard my development environment was broken. Partly because the install wiped out packages I'd installed with macports, but mostly because of the transition from 32-bit to 64 bit. So far Lion has been much kinder. My brew installed stuff seems to have survived the transition, although I needed to install the XCode 4 update, which is once again free for folks with Lion via the OS X App Store.

Admittedly I haven't pressed very hard on the old development tool chain, but, knock on wood, things look decidedly better the day after the Lion install than they did the last time.

More Flashbacks

A few days ago, I wrote about my pre installation thoughts on Lion. Not that I've been using it for a bit over a day, the new scrolling is a blessing and a curse. Although it does work the same was as my iPad and iPhone, there's a fundamental difference between dragging your finger on the 'page' itself and controlling that 'page' remotely using the trackpad. Some of that is no doubt the result of using a mouse for the past 35 years or so. I'll stick with the Lion way and see what happens, no doubt I'm going to have to learn to adjust back and forth as I use different machines, just like I still have to make an adjustment going from my MBP, to my wife's old MacBook due to the latter having a trackpad button while the newer machine does not.

This dredges up another old memory. Back in the 1980s when the PCs got mouse envy, the initial mice for PCs simply generated cursor keystrokes, and many users thought of mice as just being that, devices to quickly generate up, down, left, and right arrow keystrokes. Nowadays I'd guess that most computer users would think this was a silly idea. In reality, the way the user interacts with a computer is affected in ways both drastic and subtle by the device or devices used. Trackpads are neither mice nor are they touchscreens. Interacting directly with a touchscreen, where your finger is the pointer, and there is no separation between pointing at something and clicking on it, is inherently different than interacting indirectly through a trackpad or mouse. And a multi-touch trackpad is different than a mouse no matter how many buttons the mouse has.

While we're on the subject of scrolling, some apps in Lion. Safari for example, don't show scrollbars until you start to scroll, then when you're done they disappear. I haven't seen this kind of scrollbar behavior since Smalltalk-80. By the way scrollbars work this way in Lion in Textmate!

Oh Yeah, I Did Mention A Problem Didn't I

Just about a year ago I wrote about my my spit and baling wire linux Time Machine server. Well, after the Lion install, my Time Machine backups stopped working.

It took me a while to find the answer, but eventually I found the 'cheat' in this post to the Ubuntu forums.

I also saw reports about problems with Time Machine under Lion and third party commercial NAS products including Drobos

It turns out that Time Machine in Lion is using some new features which Apple put into AFP, the Apple Filing Protocol. Netatalk the open-source implementation of AFP, doesn't support the latest AFP 3.3 protocol, except in a beta version.

The Ubuntu forum article, followed carefully, got me back to having my MBP backing up with Time Machine to my Ubuntu box.

It also pointed to this blog post by the maintainers of Netatalk, dated 2 July, which explained their plan to hold back the source of the final version of Netatalk because "...many corporations are using and making money from Netatalk, but in the past none of these cared that the cow they’re milking gets fed, Netgear Inc. being the one exception, thanks for that." As an open-source contributor who has reaped little in the way of pecuniary reward from open-source, I can understand the sentiment. It does come across as a bit of a ransom note, but they are free to do as they want.

But I suspect Lion turned the tide here as the Netatalk article ends with an update dated 23 July (3 days after the release of Lion) saying "Thanks to the new commitment of Data Robotics, Western Digital Corporation and QNAP, there’s hope! Also, we’re reopening development, pushing all sources to the official Netatalk git VCS at Sourceforge. We expect Netatalk 2.2.0 sourcecode tarballs to be available at the Sourceforge download site soon."

Original article writen by Rick DeNatale and published on Talk Like A Duck | direct link to this article | If you are reading this article elsewhere than Talk Like A Duck, it has been illegally reproduced and without proper authorization.