Tag: OS X

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Linux computing – Intro

For many years I have worked in IT for my day job and photography has been part time for weddings, corporate portraits, and personal fun projects like most of my studio work.

For many years I was a Netware administrator, starting with Netware 2 up to Netware 6, we generally used DOS and then Windows on the desktop, with the exception of a few Sun workstations running CDE on Unix.

For home use I had the same as most users, and worked my way from DOS, Windows, 3.11, Windows 95 and then Windows 2000. I dabbled with Unix, mainly Redhat as we had a few Redhat servers at work, but it was the launch of Fedora, that made me jump from Windows at home to Linux running Fedora.

I happily ran Fedora as my main machine for many years. It was in 2005 I started to drift to the dark side. It was in 2005 I bought a lovely little 12″ PowerMac for my wife.

It was around this time that Adobe started an open pilot of a new product called Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. This was for Windows and Mac OS’s only. It was also around this time I discovered how easy colour management and colour calibration was in the Mac. So my Fedora desktop was my main desktop machine, and the Mac was used for running Adobe.

It was not long before I was using the Mac more then my wife, so I then bought my own Mac and my slip to the dark side was complete.

So I use Mac for photography but use Linux day to day. Arch and Debian are my current main distro’s.

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Strange Overnight Computer Happenings

At the end of each month I run an extra set of backups, all my previous years work is exported from Adobe Lightroom as a standalone catalogue with all my images.

When Adobe update Lightroom, once I am happy I also refresh my old backs up on this device.

As its now January and I am finally happy with Adobe Lightroom V2015.3 I have been refreshing my backups.

The problem is its not been going well.  When you shoot several thousand large high-res RAW files a year, that export is going to take a while.  I normally kick off two and leave it overnight.

This month though, when I get back to the computer in the morning its either rebooted/logged me out, or the Drobo device service and/or Lightroom has hung and the Drobo while mounted is inaccessible.

I checked for hardware issues ran some computer and disk checks, re-cabled the Drobo into the thunderbolt hub.  No luck.  When the weekend hit I disconnected all external devices and tried to figure out what was going on.  It was then I realised what was happening.  With nothing running and none of my big external drives connected the computer would cleanly log me out after a period of inactivity.

logout automatically

I have no idea how, but some update or I did it without thinking last month; but Logout after 60 minutes of inactivity was enabled.  It seems Lightroom and the Drobo running large catalogue exports counts as inactivity and they cannot cope with a logout request.

This is now turned off and normal service is back.

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Lightroom – Importing Presets

Installing Lightroom presets can be a little tricky but as Mat from Lightroom Killer Tips has recently found out, there is a far easy way;  Just Drag and drop the preset file on to your Lightroom icon. Thanks Matt.  Another great reason for having a Apple Mac, it just makes things so easy for you.

If you’re a Windows user then double click the preset file. It will most likely say it does not understand the file type. Associate the file type with Lightroom and then double click will install it.

Have not tried it in Windows, as I do not have a Windows machine handy to test it on, only Apple Mac’s, Linux, and Solaris at present. Must rebuild that Windows 7 test machine of mine.

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Moving Posts & Going Live

More Blog configuration: Tonight once home I manually moved my posts from my first blog to the new dev blog.  Just cut and paste.  Next time I need to move to a different blog, the full WordPress software allows easy export and inport.

I then backed up dev to my laptop and deleted Live.

If your after a good FTP client for OS X, I use Transmit.  Makes jobs like this very easy.

Then I FTP,ed the contents of dev to Live. Once that was done I logged into WordPress altered the paths to refer to the blog new location.

Everything seemed to work, so now the final part to delete dev.

Wow, its all still works!

Update:

Well nearly works; the picture I had in a post was lost, I suppose I need to read up on how to officially move a site!