Monday, April 22, 2013

Ubuntu on Toshiba Satellite P870 / 05P

I just bought a new Toshiba Satellite P870 / 05P laptop, amazing specs, but ten minutes of playing with windows 8 convinced me that I don't even want to dual boot. I just wanted it off my machine.

Unfortunately I then discovered that Ubuntu 12.04 has no device drivers for the wireless or Ethernet cards on this machine. Loads of head scratching and searching and I eventually found a link to a device driver on various Ubuntu forums that can be installed.

I followed the instruction about halfway down this page

However I had to use this archive instead of the one listed because Ubuntu 12.04 uses the 3.5 Kernel.

I really should read the source myself to make sure nothing nasty has been inserted into this code, but for now I am depending on the goodwill of my fellow Ubuntu users.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

iOS Renewal Process

You would think that renewing your development membership would be all that you need to do on a yearly basis to keep working as an Apple developer.
It should be just: pay the fee and keep on developing. Unfortunately it is not that simple.

Your certificates and provisioning profiles need to be renewed, regenerated, and installed before you can continue. As I have not found a reasonable walk-through for this process, either from Apple or on their forums, I will quickly sketch it out here:


1) Clear out your old Provisioning profiles in Xcode

Open the XCode Organizer. Select "Provisioning Profiles," go through the list and delete all the expired certificates.


2) Remove your existing certificates in Keychain Access

Open the Utilities fold in your Mac's Applications. Open Keychain Access and then select "My Certificates." You will see your expired certificates (Dev and Dist) listed. Remove them both.


3) Create new certificates

Keeping Keychain Access open, click:
Keychain Access>Certificate Assistant>Request a Certifcate From a Certificate Authority.
Choose "Save to Disk" and save the request file.

Open the Certificates section of the iOS Provisioning Portal.

Delete the existing Development Certificate.
Click the "+" Symbol to create a new development certificate.
Select the top option "iOS App Development"
Click Continue.
Upload the certificate request file you created and finish.

Click "+" again to create a distribution certificate.
Choose the "App Store and Ad Hoc" option and continue.
Upload the certificate request file and finish.


 4) Regenerate the Provisioning Profiles

Click the "Provisioning Profiles" in the iOS Provisioning Portal.
Go through each of your development and distribution profiles and edit them.
When you edit them you will see an option to select the new certificate that you generated. Once selected the "Generate" button will become active, click to generate and download the new profiles.


 5) Install the Certificates and Provisioning Profiles
 
Install the downloaded certificates and provisioning profiles by dragging them into Keychain Access and XCode respectively.

You can now test your development apps and distribute them to the app store just like before you renewed. Just remember to select the correct profile when you are building your app.