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Appendix

Suse says Bonjour

Suse 10.1, in the shops since mid-2007, already includes a complete Bonjour implementation. Suse 10 included the mDNSResponder (mdnsd) only and did not include either man pages or dns-sd. Still older versions are without Bonjour altogether. It is, however, possible, with a little leg work, to set up the complete mDNSResponder archive from Apple. There are no RPMs, so users will have to compile the source code [4]. After unpacking the archive into a folder of your choice, you should switch to the mDNSPosix sub-folder and start the process using:

make os=linux

The files would normally then be placed in the relevant system directories using make install, however this does not work with the current version of mDNSResponder, version 107.5, because the makefile is meant to create a start script called \u201emdns\u201c in the etc/init.d/ folder, but fails to do so, because it is in fact called \u201emdnsd\u201c. This can be fixed by appending \u201ed\u201c to the corresponding line in the makefile:

STARTUPSCRIPTNAME?=mdnsd

Burnished browsers

There are plenty of Bonjour browsers with graphical user interfaces for Mac OS X, but they are still rare on other operating systems. For example, Apple's plugin for Internet Explorer shows web servers only and does not even query other Bonjour services. There is not as yet a Bonjour plugin for Firefox. However, it is possible to install a plugin for Windows Explorer which displays web servers on the network - STG's Zeroconf Neighbourhood Explorer. Click on a web server and Windows Explorer passes the URL to the pre-set browser - which can be also be either Firefox or Opera.

Users looking for a browser for Windows or Linux which displays all Bonjour services in a GUI can fall back on the Python Bonjour interface, but will need to set up Swig 1.3. Konqueror can now be used as a Bonjour browser on Linux systems which include Apple's version of Bonjour by entering mdns:/ in the address bar. Konqueror, like most other Bonjour browsers, does not actually resolve the URLs, but merely lists parts of the mDNS information for a specific service or server (protocol, port, IP address, etc.)

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