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Fedora 18 and OS X 10.8 Interworking

What follows are notes I took while getting Fedora 13 and OS X 10.6 to play nice and later upgrading to Fedora 18 and OS X 10.8.  Newer versions of Fedora and OS X will probably act slightly different.

Access Fedora Filesystem from OS X

The following will let you see Fedora box in Finder and mount Linux home directories.  You can also add additional share points.  Any share point can be used as locations for Time Machine backups.

yum install netatalk
systemctl enable netatalk
vi /etc/atalk/AppleVolumes.default

You'll want the contents at bottom to look something like this.  Here, I enabled user home directories and a location to store Time Machine backups.  Note the "tm" option. This is required if you want to TimeMachine to automatically see this share without resorting to updating an OS X perference to show unsupported network volumes.

# The line below sets some DEFAULT, starting with Netatalk 2.1.
:DEFAULT: options:upriv,usedots,noadouble

# The "~" below indicates that Home directories are visible by default.
# If you do not wish to have people accessing their Home directories,
# please put a pound sign in front of the tilde or delete it.
~
/path/to/put/backups TimeMachine options:usedots,upriv,nadouble,tm

Also, edit /etc/netatalk/netatalk.conf and make sure following options say "yes".

AFPD_RUN=yes

And last, a modification to /etc/netatalk/afpd.conf is needed.  In older Fedora/OSX combo's, this step wasn't needed.  It seems by default DHX2 security module requires PAM to be set up but most default Fedora boxes are using /etc/passwd for storage.  So connections will fail because of no password access.  Edit /etc/netatalk/afpd.conf and add this line to force DHX2 to look for passwords in /etc/passwd.

- -tcp -noddp -uamlist uams_dhx.so,uams_dhx2_passwd.so

Now, start netatalk.

systemctl start netatalk

Remote Desktop

Enabling Remote Desktop under Gnome will automatically make Fedora box visible under OS X Finder.  Clicking on connect button will work fine.

Enabling Remote Desktop under OS X will automatically make OS X visible under Fedora's "Remote Desktop Viewer" app.  Clicking on OS X will give an error message about authentication method being unsupported.

TODO: I've read that by default, OS X uses its own authentication protocol that understands OS X users/groups and their passwords.  If you enable "Log in with passwords", or similar option in OS X preferences then its supposed to fall back to standard VNC authentication.  That means you must enable VNC passwords to interoperate with Linux.  I've not tested this yet.

Printing to remote CUPS rinters

Fedora and OS X both use CUPS so you'd think this would be a piece of cake.  For what ever reason, discovering of remote CUPS printers was disabled in OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Since Apple took over CUPS project, it looks like they are removing support for this old method so its not really worth pursuing re-enabling it.  It is possible to manual add a CUPS/IPP printer using instructions you can google.

TODO: I've not tried printing from Fedora to OS X but I assume its similar and just works if you set printer to be shared.  Fedora 19 is scheduled to upgrade to CUPS 1.6 with some additional patches to support printer discovery using Avahi.  Things will probably but much more compatible soon.

Note: I attempted to allow viewing Linux printers without the BrowseRemoteProtocols modfiication by installing "netatalk" package and editing the file /etc/netatalk/papd.conf to add following line:

cupsautoadd:op=root:

Upon restarting netatalk, message log prints a message about netatalk was not compiled with CUPS support.  I don't think its worth pursuing further since direct communication with CUPS is likely way forward.

Sharing Music

If you load Rhythmbox, it will automatically see iTunes running from OS X.  Clicking on OS X share name will give status message of "Retrieving songs from music share" and it will hang there.

Wikipedia's page on DAAP states that as of June 2010, the newer authentication has not be reverse engineered and so non-iTunes apps can not connect to iTunes version 7.0 or newer.  I guess if that is ever done then Rhythmbox will naturally gain support with an upgrade.

It is no problem to share Fedora music with OS X.  Run Rhythmbox and click Edit->Plugins.  Make sure DAAP Music Sharing has a check mark and click on its Configure... button.  Make sure its enabled.  This allows at least MP3 files to be played from OS X side in iTunes.


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