Ekiga on OSX
I need this.. I could probably do it myself and have something in 2-3 years but there is only one of me. I'm willing to start a fund for it. Or trade something for it.. Or something.. Through out most of my life there are a few programs that I have come to rely on. Linux, Bash, X11, Vim, GCC, GDB (even though sometimes I curse it) and Ekiga. "A bunch of terms and Ekiga and I've got what I consider a desktop system" It's just that simple. It's been extremely hard for me to get by without it. You maybe asking yourself why? "Hell, there are all sorts of sip replacement and software phones you could use." All that maybe true, but none of them have the quality and ease of use of Ekiga. I'm just used to it, it's like someone telling me to stop using vim. It's just barbaric to me at this point to use something else. Plus I have the code, I don't have to worry about what's going on behind the scenes or learn some new code base.
"Ohhh, Chris you're just paranoid". No.. actually I am not. Tapped lines, people listening in on your phone calls.. Common place. You may not think so, but I know so. I realize this post will probably be a shot in the dark. Everyone on OSX will continue to use iChat or Skype and this will fall on not even deaf ears but into a large void of nothingness. There will be one person though, somewhere out there who also wants Ekiga on OSX and hopefully you've found this.
We are here, in this big black void of nothingness together and maybe someday if we are a small group. We can get together and do something about it. When that day comes.. I will recall this story and recite the birth as the cure which changed everything. Much like the spoken narration to the conclusion of "I Am Legend".
Light up the darkness.
Openindiana ZFS + TimeMachine Backup Server
So, you want the stability and redundancy of ZFS. You also want to use Apple's Time Machine client but don't want to buy apple kit in order to backup your files. I'm using
OpensolarisOpenindiana in a JBOD setup to do this pretty easily. There are some good howto's on doing this on the net for Linux. This howto in specific for Ubuntu is located here. It's an excellent guide you can follow for doing the same onOpensolaris; Openindiana, however compiling netatalk onOpensolarisOpenindiana needs some modification and there is an excellent howto on doing this here.There are a couple of things to note.
OpensolarisOpenindiana uses it's own stack for mdns. When you get to the instructions on avahi you should not need to download or install this at all. There is a daemon called the avahi-daemon-bridge that essentially bridges avahi client calls for userspace clients like Ekiga that need it. So essentially you can skip that part of the instruction.OpensolarisOpenindiana uses SMF (Service Management Framework) to manage it's processes. So where you see things like "restart x process" in the guide you'll be doing something like "svcadm restart FMRI" where FMRI stands for Fault Managed Resource Identifier.That's about it, note that you don't need to use AFP at all. You can also just install Samba via
OpenSolarisOpenindiana and create a share and have TimeMachine use that and it also works just as great!