Recently I removed Fedora 10 from my Linux server at home and installed Ubuntu 9.10 Server. I did this partly because I was tired of finding packages that weren’t available on Fedora but were available in Ubuntu. Ironically I ended up trading one mess for another. Under Fedora I was compiling software that simply wasn’t available, but under Ubuntu I need to recompile the provided netatalk package in order to enable support for newer versions of OS X.

Netatalk is the Linux package for providing the native file sharing protocol to Macs and also provides better performance than Samba under most conditions. The missing feature in this case seems like quite the over site considering it makes the software virtually useless on networks with modern Macs as it prevents them from authenticating. Lucky for me, someone else has gone through the work of figuring out what it takes to get things working again.

The information is Debian/Ubuntu centric but you should be able to apply the same fix on other distributions. Here’s the link http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/