Mounting .mac iDisk on Ubuntu
I tend to keep some files that I need access to from different computers on my .mac iDisk account, when on a windows computer Apple has a utility to mount the file system, but when using Linux (Ubuntu in my case) your out of luck.
But luckily iDisk is just a webdav share so mounting it is pretty easy.
Firstly do a
sudo apt-get install davfs2
This will install the required utility to mount webdav file systems.
Then fire up your favorite editor and edit
/etc/davfs2/secrets
And ad a entry like this
http://idisk.mac.com/username USERNAME PASSWORD
to mount the file system manually type
mount -t davfs http://idisk.mac.com/username /mnt/idisk
That’s it, your ready to go.
If you like to have it automatically mounted when booting you have to edit /etc/fstab and add
http://idisk.mac.com/username /mnt/idisk davfs user 0 0
PDF Printing in Ubuntu
One of the nicest features on my OSX machine is the built in function to print everything to a PDF, fortunate it’s really easy to ad this feature to Ubuntu to (for the record when forced to used a Windows box the free ware PrimoPDF does a decent job as-well)
Start of by installing the cups-pdf package with apt (or synaptic if you prefer).
sudo apt-get install cups-pdf
Next do a
sudo chmod +s /usr/lib/cups/backend/cups-pdf
Finally in Gnome add a new printer by going to “System > Administration > Printing”, select New Printer select Local Printer & Use a Detached Printer, select PDF Printer.
Onto the next screen select the Generic manufacturer, and the “Postscript color printer rev3b”. Leave the driver set to “Standard”
You are now up and running with PDF printing in Ubuntu.
By default the PDF-files is stored in ~/PDF , but this is easily changed by modifying your /etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf look for the line Out ${HOME}/PDF
Sun JDK on Ubuntu (The multiverse way)
The 6.06 Dapper release includes support for Sun JVMs via the Multiverse repositories.
Add support for multiverse to your /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://pa.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper multiverse
deb-src http://pa.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper multiverse
Do a standard sudo apt-get update , followed by a sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jdk .