Installing netatalk in Corel Linux

Netatalk is a package that lets a Unix machine supply Appletalk print and file services on a LAN. With netatalk, Macintosh computers can mount Unix volumes from the Chooser, as if they were standard Appletalk network devices.

This HOWTO only deals with one implementation - Corel Linux 1.2 with kernel version 2.2.16. You might want to look at Anders Brownworth's Linux Netatalk-HOWTO for the full story.

You only have to do two things. First, recompile your kernel to include support for Appletalk. Next, install the packages with Corel Update. Sounds easy, and it was, eventually. So, how come it took me about two months to work it out?

Does your kernel already support Appletalk?

1.	Open a console and execute:   # dmesg | grep Apple If you get a message like Appletalk 0.18 for linux NET4.0 then you have Classic Appletalk compiled into your kernel. Skip to 3.
2.	Out of the box CLOS 1.2 does not include support in the kernel for Appletalk. Recompile your kernel to include it. (It's not as hard as you might fear). Follow the instructions here
3.	Install the netatalk-dev_1.4b2+asun2.1.3-6 and netatalk_1.4b2+asun2.1.3-6 packages. You can do this with Corel Update, but you have to do some editing of the package source list first. CLOS 1.2 ships with slink as the default package source in Corel Update. You must change this to the potato distribution. Detailed instructions on how to do this can be found here. Failure to do so will result in error messages like: No such file or directory - http://http.us.debian.org/debian slink/main Packages In summary, you have to set the source URL to http://http.us.debian.org the Distribution to debian and the Version to potato. Then you connect to the Internet and Update the profile. A list of available packages will be downloaded. When that's completed, you search for the netatalk packages in the Available Software section. Use the Find command and search for 'netatalk'. You are looking for two files, netatalk-dev and netatalk. Mark both the files by clicking on the dot to the left of the package name in the Action column. The icon will change to one with a green arrow. Then select Upgrade and install packages from the File menu. The packages, and the ones they depend on, will then start to download. The files are automatically installed when the download finishes. When I finally succeeded (and in stark contrast to my previous attempts) the installer didn't remove useful packages such as kde and qmail, but installed a bunch of things like libpam and netbase instead. When the install finished, the atalk, afpd and papd daemons were all running, with a script to start them at bootup in /etc/init.d/ If the daemons do not start, check you have Appletalk compiled into the kernel, as in Step 1 above.
4.	The linux server appears in the Mac's Chooser under Appleshare as 'hostname', (i.e. the hostname of your linux box). Access is password protected using the usernames and passwords set on the linux server. The default directory and its name is specified in the file /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default and you can edit this file to include shared resources as well as the default Home Directory.

Further Reading

The man pages for atalkd and afpd

The Net-HOWTO which is part of the Linux Documentation Project

The Netatalk FAQ-O-Matic at http://www.zettabyte.net/netatalk

The Netatalk homepage at http://www.umich.edu/~rsug/netatalk/

The Netatalk Project on Sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/netatalk/

Comments

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