I have a gentoo linux box that shares out a usb printer. The shared printer through Linux lets us print with only one printer in the house. I make this happen with samba and cups. It hasn’t been the best because it has quirks and problems every once and a while. A network printer would be a better solution, however cutting edge printing technology doesn’t blow my skirt up. I’ve had the same ink slave since college.

Then suddenly, my chica couldn’t print from her mac laptop. She’d print something, the printer app “HP 812c” (the name of the printer) would pop up (similar as the printer icon in the tasktray) and tell her there was an error: NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE. The same thing happened with my mac a while ago but I figured it was just me. Now, she doesn’t update as often as I do and I read a post saying that people are having all kinds of problems with the smbclient and blah blah. So it’s possible that a recent update nuked her print ability, ahem, our print ability. She was our last hope. Our sole printer. Now no one can print mapquest directions and files named hee_hee.txt contianing important information like Your dumb face smells like stupid, hee hee..

Gentoo is a great OS. Linux is a great OS. But for a print server, it blows. It’s impossible to remember how to clear the queue, how to log in to administrate the printer classes and all the rest of the instructions that I had to keep in a text file to remind myself how to troubleshoot a home printer every 3 months.

I googled and googled for this NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE weirdness but couldn’t find anything. I played with samba and remember doing this kind of troubleshooting 3 months ago. Why does this crap work for a while and just break?

I threw up my hands and peddled to the Apple Store and bought a Mac Mini with the intention of sharing it out with AppleTalk or rendezvous for less home-stress.

The switch was easy. I booted it up. It asked if I wanted to migrate data. I said yes and connected a firewire cable to my laptop and the mini. 50GBs later, it booted up with my wallpaper, apps, bookmarks, passwords, wireless network settings, iTunes library, startup login items … everything. Except a few apps didn’t come over right. Subethaedit, Azuerus, DiscBlaze, X-Chat Aqua all had little ? icons in the dock. I found that all of them are PowerPC apps. So I downloaded new versions and everything was fine.

Then it really started to get slow. I was running updates, installing Xcode and doing lots of stuff. The screen would lag and freeze… it ran slower than my powerbook. I ordered 2gb of DDR2 memory off of Newegg and found some instructions on how to upgrade the mini’s memory. I’ll be getting a putty knife I suppose…

I named the Mini Stormbringer, as a new Transformers namimg convention. It beats my lame Calvin & Hobbes one. All the cables were there from my docked laptop, now my laptop can roam free.

I went through my ~/Apps folder (where I throw new installs) and I deleted all my PPC apps. They run way too slow and I was finding replacements for most of them. Firefox runs brilliantly, slaying my g4. All the Apple apps run fantastic. I also found a way to span three screens with my favorite reverse KVM (Synergy). I didn’t know it could do three screens but I guess it can. My XP box is in the middle, the mini is on the left and my powerbook is on the right. It has no problem copying the clipboard from the powerbook (right) all the way to the mini’s clipboard (left) even though it’s the XP’s keyboard and OS (center) that is executing the Ctrl+C (or Apple+C).

All and all, it runs faster than my g4 but doesn’t smoke my AMD PC (fx-57). But it’s apples to oranges, Vista isn’t exactly springy on my AMD box either.

I tried running World of Warcraft on the mini and it’s an interesting experience. It’s faster than running on my crappy powerbook but it’s not too much different than playing slow-pitch on Ether. The mini has this really, really crappy video card. It’s very similar to the business machines that dell loves to sell people in corporations. The mini has an Intel 960gma card in it. It’s very close to the ever popular Intel gma945 and gma950 card as I said many companies bought in the XP SP1/2 hayday. The thing is, Vista and less so OSX really won’t love this card too much. I’m not being a fanboy here, the mini gets by just fine in the OSX world. But then you fire up a game and it really shows its colors. In the Vista world, well, that’s why Intel released the 965 chipset. You’re going to have to upgrade to a minor gaming rig (very minor) and screw that $500 dell business junk. It’s not going to cut it. The corporate world doesn’t care about video performance. And yet, here comes Vista. Better get the intel 965 next time around in that Dell box. Or, just skip Vista until SP1 and WinFS.

Anyway, whatever card is in it, it’s only slightly better than my powerbook’s ATI 9700 which is a real dog. The 960 has no video memory on it! Yeah, that’s right, it shares system memory. This is bad. This is real bad! Video memory is usually super fast. It can do all these great tricks before it hits the slow lane cpu bus. Developers know it, hardware people know it. And consumers looking to save money (like me), don’t care. You cut a corner and bam, no video performance when it comes to games.

But that’s ok. The damn machine is like a drink coaster. It’s quiet (it spins up in WoW but not even 25% what my powerbook does), it fits in a tiny space on my desk and it actually shared out my printer correctly. I hope to god I can avoid the cups.conf file and just get on with my work/play when I come home. Anyway, I’ll let you know how the memory upgrade goes. It needs it badly.

Check that iStat dashboard widget to the right. See how it picked up the icon from the harddisk? Pretty cool.