More and more businesses are adopting Apple’s OSX platform and leaving behind the legacy Macintosh OS’s, but what about smaller printshops and community newspapers that aren’t quite ready to make the move to OSX. Some of these shops still need a file server that will work with their existing Macintosh systems, yet won’t become obsolete when they finally do make the decision to upgrade. Here’s where Linux and Netatalk come to the rescue.
Netatalk is a compatability layer that allows legacy Macintosh systems (pre-OSX) to mount Linux volumes via the Chooser as if they were standard Appletalk network devices. Support for appletalk may not be built into your existing kernel, so recompiling the kernel may be necessary to get this functionality. Once you have a Linux server with appletalk compiled into the kernel, read Appleshare IP on Linux located at LinuxPlanet to get your inexpensive fileserver up and running on your local legacy Mac network.
Posted by Philip McClure in Linux on April 10, 2004