Apple WWDC ’07 highlights

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

So, this week is Apple’s worldwide developer conference (WWDC) and I’ve been waiting to see if:

  • Apple will finally update the iPod (no… unless you count the iPhone… and I don’t want an iPhone – well, never say never, but it won’t be available over here for a while yet).
  • Apple will launch new MacBook Pros so I can pick up one of the outgoing models at a discount (yes… they actually updated the MacBook Pro just before WWDC but that new LCD display sounds so good I might have to save up for one of the new ones instead).

The video below features some of the highlights from the conference keynote including something that I personally find interesting – Apple’s decision to release Safari for Windows. Whilst this cannot be a bad thing (hey, look what competition from Firefox did to wake up Microsoft and get them to update Internet Explorer), I don’t use Safari on my Mac because so many websites don’t work with it… I can’t see that being any different under Windows; on the flip side, it may wake developers up to the presence of Safari and they might actually develop standards-compliant sites that work across all platforms (meanwhile Apple gets the advertising revenue from the search box and a foothold for application development on the Windows desktop). Regardless of the reasoning behind producing Safari for Windows, it does kind of disprove the whole “we’re really strapped for resources getting the iPhone out and that’s why we’re delaying Leopard” argument. Then again, maybe it was a rush job, as they certainly don’t look to have spent much time making sure it was secure – beta product or not, using known tools to find a flaw inside three minutes is something that Apple should have done before they released it.

I waited to publish this post in case there were some extra items to get excited about later in the week but there doesn’t seem to have been much more to shout about. A million people downloaded Safari for Windows in the first couple of days (that’s pretty good) but I heard anecdotal reports that developers felt patronised by the whole approach to third party application development for the iPhone – John Gruber sums it up on his Daring Fireball blog when he paraphrases the Apple message as “you can write great apps for the iPhone: they’re called ‘web sites'” (he also links to Michael Tsai’s interesting observation about what Steve Jobs said on iPhone application development at D5 and what he said a week or so later at WWDC). According to the MarketWatch video below, analysts and others affiliated with Apple described the keynote as disappointing.

I’ll admit that the finder needs some tweaks and that using Coverflow for documents looks very cool but as for Steve Jobs’ statement that Tiger is already better than the competition and that Leopard will further increase that lead – I just don’t get it.

Remote Desktop alternative for Mac users

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I frequently connect to Windows hosts from my Mac and I have been using the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection client for Mac OS X. The trouble with this is that it only allows a single connection and it’s not a universal binary (it also has a tendency to crash on exit, requiring a forced quit). I use rdesktop on my Linux boxes, and figured it ought to be available for the Mac (it is, using fink, or by compiling from source) but I also came across CoRD (via Lifehacker) and TSclientX (via the comments on the Lifehacker post) – both of which seem to offer a much richer user experience:

  • CoRD allows multiple RDP connections as well as storing login credentials. It seems pretty responsive too.
  • TSclientX s essentially a GUI wrapper for rdesktop and therefore requires X11. That shouldn’t really be a problem but it does sometimes feel like a bit of a kludge – even so, it has the potential to be extremely useful as it supports SeamlessRDP. Unfortunately, SeamlessRDP requires additional software to be present on the remote Windows system and I couldn’t get it to work for me, possibly because I was connecting to a Windows XP machine (which only supports a single connection) and rdesktop creates a X11 window for each window on the server side.

At the moment, I’ve settled on CoRD, largely due to its ease of use but both clients seem to offer a great improvement over Microsoft’s RDP offering for Mac users.

Mac vs. PC (vs. Linux)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few months back, I wrote a post about the Mac vs. PC ads (which, funny as they are, as a user of Macintosh, Windows and Linux PCs, I find to be a little misleading sometimes and downright untruthful others) before following it up when I heard an amusing Mac vs. PC parody on BBC Radio 4’s The Now Show. It was interesting to hear that Mac Format magazine judged the ads as ineffective because the largest group of consumers to whom they appeal are already Mac users (although Apple’s continuation of the Get a Mac campaign would suggest that it is working for them) and, in the comments on my recent post about some of the consumer-targeted features in Windows Vista being just as good as the functionality offered by Mac OS X, I was criticised for saying:

“Apple’s Get a Mac campaign draws on far too many half truths that will only become apparent to users after they have made the decision to switch, splashed out on the (admittedly rather nice) Apple hardware and then found out that the grass is not all green on the other side.”

Regardless of the effectiveness (or honesty) of the original ads, late last night, whilst researching for my rebuttal of those comments, I came across some more Mac vs. PC ads:

I’ve said before that the whole “my operating system is better than your operating system” nonsense is quite ridiculous really but the TrueNuff guys have it all just about summed up:

“Why would you love a Mac? Computers are computers. Macs are great. So are PCs. So are toasters – what’s your point? It’s just a computer – get over it.”

I’m enjoying the spoof ads though!

Recovering data after destroying the Mac OS X partition table

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’m not a religious man but every once in a while I do something stupid and find myself hoping for some divine intervention. Yesterday, I excelled in my stupidity with what was probably the single most careless thing that I have ever done in my entire computing life, accidentally re-initialising my external hard disk (containing, amongst other things, my iTunes library and irreplaceable digital photos of my children) and the backup disk.

In a mild state of panic, I called my friend Alex who gave me two excellent pieces of advice:

  • Do nothing with the corrupted disks. Sit tight. Calm down. Wait and see what turns up from researching similar scenarios on the ‘net.
  • Submit a post to some of the Mac forums (Mac OS X Hints, Apple Discussions, Mac Geekery) and see if anyone can recommend a suitable course of action.

Thank you Alex.

And thank you Stanley Horwitz, debaser626, Tom Larkin and Joe VanZandt for coming back to me with recommendations almost straightaway. Almost everyone suggested running a tool from Prosoft Engineering called Data Rescue II.

In addition to its primary role of recovering lost data on hard disks, this $99 utility (a small price in comparision to professional data recovery fees) has two especially important features: it is non-destructive as all restoration has to be to another volume; and it can be run in demo mode first to check that data is recoverable before having to be registered.

A quick scan turned up no recoverable files but a thorough scan was more useful. After a few hours reading 6 billion disk blocks and another couple analysing the data, it found my files. Unfortunately the progress bar gives no indication as to how many files might be recoverable whilst the scan is taking place, presumably because files may be spread across many disk blocks but it found my files!

The recovered files were marked as orphans, CBR (whatever that is) and then a whole load of them actually had their original file names and other metadata. After successfully recovering a single file, I bought a license and set about recovering the entire contents of the disk to another volume. Unfortunately it hung after failing to read one of the files but I repeated the operation (this time saving my scan results so that I can exit and relaunch the application if necessary) and successfully restored my digital photos. The relief is immense and I’m presently running a full restoration of the entire disk contents (I imagine that a large part of tomorrow will be spent working out which files I need, and which were actually deliberately deleted files recovered along with the lost data).

Other potentially useful tools, which I didn’t try but which might be useful to others, include:

  • GRC Spinrite – for proactive hard disk maintenance and recovery of data from failing hard disks (disk recovery – not partition recovery)
  • Alsoft DiskWarrior – for damaged directory structures (file system recovery – not partion recovery).
  • SubRosaSoft File Salvage – another partition recovery tool.

Note that I haven’t tried any of these tools myself – I’m simply alerting any poor soul who stumbles across this page to their existence.

I was lucky. Very lucky.

The moral of this story – don’t rely on a single backup that is overwritten nightly and permanently connected to your computer. I really must take more frequent DVD backups of crucial files and store a disk backup offsite.

I should know better.

Get a Mac? Maybe, but Windows Vista offers a more complete package than you might think

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ll freely admit that I have been critical of Windows Vista at times and I’ll stand by my comments published in Computer Weekly last November – Windows XP will remain in mainstream use for quite some time. Having said that, I can’t see Mac OS X or Linux taking the corporate desktop by storm and the move to Vista is inevitable, just not really a priority for many organisations right now.

Taking off my corporate hat one evening last week, I made the trip to Microsoft’s UK headquarters in Reading for an event entitled “Vista after hours”. Hosted by James Senior and Matt McSpirit it was a demo-heavy and PowerPoint-light tour of some of the features in Windows Vista that we can make use of when we’re not working. Not being a gamer and having bought a Mac last year, I’ve never really paid attention to Microsoft’s digital home experience but I was, quite frankly, blown away by what I saw.

The first portion of the evening looked at some of the out-of-the-box functionality in Windows Vista, covering topics like search, drilling down by searching within results, using metadata to tag objects, live previews and saving search queries for later recall as well as network diagnosis and repair. Nothing mind-blowing there but well-executed all the same. Other topics covered included the use of:

  • Windows Photo Gallery (which includes support for the major, unprocessed, raw mode formats as well as more common, compressed, JPEG images) to perform simple photo edits and even to restore to the original image (cf. a photographic negative).
  • Windows Movie Maker to produce movies up to 1080p.
  • Windows DVD Maker to produce DVD menus with support for both NTSC and PAL as well as 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios.
  • Windows Media Player to organise media in many ways (stack/sort by genre, year, songs, album, artist, rating, recently added, etc.) and share that media.

Apple Macintosh users will think “yeah, I have iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and iTunes to do all that” and they would be correct but Apple says (or at least implies in its advertising) that it’s hard to do these things on a PC – with Vista it’s just not… which moves me on to backup – not provided (at least in GUI form) by the current Mac OS X release (only with a .Mac subscription) and much improved in Windows Vista. “Ah yes, but Leopard will include Time Machine!”, say the Mac users – Windows has had included the volume shadow copy service (VSS/VSC) since Windows XP and Windows Backup includes support for multiple file versions right now as well as both standard disk-based backups and snapshots to virtual hard disk (.VHD) images, which can then be used as a restore point or mounted in Virtual PC/Virtual Server as a non-bootable disk. Now that does sound good to me and I’m sure there must be a way to make the .VHD bootable for physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to physical (V2P) migrations… maybe that’s something to have a play with another day.

Regardless of all the new Vista functionality, for me, the most interesting part of the first session was Windows Home Server. I’m a registered beta user for this product but must confess I haven’t got around to installing it yet. Well, I will – in fact I’m downloading the April CTP as I write this. Based on Windows 2003 Small Business Server, it provides a centralised console for management of and access to information stored at home. Microsoft claim that it has low hardware requirements – just a large hard disk – I guess low hardware requirements is a subjective term (and I figure that my idea of low hardware requirements and Microsoft’s may differ somewhat), nevertheless it offers the opportunity to secure data (home computer backup and restore, including scheduling), provide centralised storage (a single storage pool, broken out as shared storage, PC backups, operating system and free space), monitor network health (i.e. identify unsafe machines on the network), provide remote access (via an HTTPS connection to a defined web address) and stream media, all controlled through a central console. Because the product is aimed at consumers, ease of use will be key to its success and it includes some nice touches like scheduled backups and automatic router configuration for remote access. Each client computer requires a connection pack in order to allow Home Server to manage it (including associating account information for secuirity purposes) and, in response to one of my questions, Microsoft confirmed that there will be support for non-Windows clents (e.g. Mac OS X 10.5 and even Linux). Unfortunately, product pricing has not yet been released and early indications are that this will be an OEM-only product; that will be a great shame for many users who would like to put an old PC to use as a home server.

Another area covered in the first session was parental controls – not really something that I worry about right now but maybe I will over the next few years as my children start to use computers. Windows Vista includes the ability for parents to monotor their child’s activities including websites, applications, e-mail, instant messages and media. Web filters can be used to prevent access to certain content with an HTTP 450 response, including a link for a parent to approve and unblock access to the content as well as time limits on access (providing a warning before forcing a logout). Similarly, certain games can be blocked for younger users of the family PC. The volume and diversity of the questions at the event would indicate that Vista’s parental controls are fairly simplistic and will not be suitable for all (for example, time limits are on computer access as a whole and not for a particular application, so it’s not possible to allow a child access to the computer to complete their homework but to limit games to a certain period in the evening and at weekends).

If session one had whetted my appetite for Vista, session two (Vista: Extended) blew my mind and by the time I went home, I was buzzing…

I first heard of Windows SideShow as a way to access certain content with a secondary display, e.g. to provide information about urgent e-mails and upcoming appointments on the lid of a laptop computer but it actually offers far more than this – in fact, the potential for SideShow devices is huge. Connectivity can be provided by USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth – Windows doesn’t care – and the home automation possibilities are endless. I can really see the day when my fridge includes capabilities for ordering groceries via a SideShow display in the door. There is at least one website devoted to SideShow devices but James Senior demonstrated a laptop bag with a built-in SideShow controller including a cache for media playback. Typically used to expose information from a Windows Sidebar gadget, SideShow devices will wake up a sleeping computer to synchrosise content then put it back to sleep and can be secured with a PIN or even erased when logged off. Access is controlled within the Windows Control Panel and there is an emulator available to simulate SideShow devices.

As elegant as Apple Front Row is, for once Microsoft outshines the competition with Windows Media Center

Next up was Windows Media Center. Unlike with the Windows XP Media Center and Tablet PC editions, Microsoft no longer provides a separate SKU for this functionality, although it is not enabled in all Vista product editions. Media Center is a full-screen application that offers a complete home media hub – sort of like Apple Front Row but with support for TV tuners to include personal video recorder (PVR) functionality. As elegant as Apple Front Row is, for once Microsoft outshines the competition with Windows Media Center – multiple TV tuners can be installed (e.g. to pause live TV, or to record two items at once, as well as the elctronic programme guide (EPG), controls, etc. being displayed as an overlay on the currently playing content. As with Windows Media Player, visualisations are provided and in theory it ought to be possible to remote control a Media Center PC via Windows Home Server and set up a recording remotely. Individual programs, or whole series, can be recorded and many TV tuners include DVB-T (digital terrestrial) support (i.e. Freeview), with other devices such as satellite and cable TV decoders needing a kludge with a remote infra-red controller (a limitation of Sky/Virgin Media network access rather than with Windows). Other functionality includes RSS support as well as integration with Windows Live Messenger and some basic parental controls (not as extensive as elsewhere in Windows Vista but nevertheless allowing a PIN to be set on certain recordings).

The event was also my first opportunity to look at a Zune. It may be a rather half-hearted attempt at producing a media player (no podcast support and, crucially, no support for Microsoft’s own PlaysForSure initiative) but in terms of form-factor it actually looks pretty good – and it includes functionality that’s missing from current iPods like a radio. If only Apple could produce an iPod with a similarly-sized widescreen display (not the iPhone) then I’d be more than happy. It also seems logical to me that as soon as iTunes is DRM-free then the iTunes/iPod monopoly will be broken as we should be able to use music purchased from the largest online music store (iTunes) on the world’s favourite portable media player (iPod) together with Windows Media Center… anyway, I digress…

I mentioned earlier that I’m not a gamer. Even so, the Xbox 360‘s ability to integrate with Windows PCs is an impressive component of the Microsoft’s digital home experience arsenal. With its dashboard interface based around a system of “blades”, the Xbox 360 is more than just a games machine:

As well as the Xbox 360 Core and Xbox 360 Pro (chrome) systems Microsoft has launched the Xbox 360 Elite in the United States – a black version with a 120GB hard disk and HDMI connectivity, although it’s not yet available here in the UK (and there are also some limited edition Yellow Xbox 360s to commemorate the Simpsons movie).

Finally, Microsoft demostrated Games for Windows Live – bringing the XBox 360 Live experience to Windows Vista-based PC gaming. With an Xbox 360 wireless gaming receiver for Windows, Vista PC gamers can even use an Xbox 360 wireless controller (and not just for gaming – James Senior demonstrated using it to navigate Windows Live maps, including the 3D and bird’s eye views). Not all games that are available for both PCs and the Xbox will offer the cross-platform live experience; however the first one that will is called Shadowrun (and is due for release on 1 June 2007) bringing two of the largest gaming platforms together and providing a seamless user experience (marred only by the marketing decision to have two types of account – silver for PC-PC interaction and gold for PC-XBox).

Apple’s Get a Mac campaign draws on far too many half truths that will only become apparent to users after they have made the decision to switch… and then found out that the grass is not all green on the other side

So, after all this, would I choose a Mac or a Windows PC? (or a Linux PC?) Well, like so many comparisons, it’s just not that simple. I love my Mac, but Apple’s Get a Mac campaign draws on far too many half truths that will only become apparent to users after they have made the decision to switch, splashed out on the (admittedly rather nice) Apple hardware and then found out that the grass is not all green on the other side. In addition, Apple’s decision to delay the next release of OS X whilst they try to enter the mobile phone market makes me question how committed to the Macintosh platform they really are. Linux is good for techies and, if you can support yourself, it has the potential to be free of charge. If you do need support though, some Linux distros can be more expensive than Windows. So what about Windows, still dominant and almost universally despised by anyone who realises that there is a choice? Actually, Windows Vista is rather good. It may still have far too much legacy code for my liking (which is bound to affect security and stability) but it’s nowhere near as bad as the competition would have us thinking… in fact it hasn’t been bad since everything moved over to the NT codebase and, complicated though the product versions may be, Windows Vista includes alternatives to the iLife suite shipped with a new Macs as well as a superior media hub. Add the Xbox integration and Windows SideShow into the mix and the Microsoft digital home experience is excellent. Consumers really shouldn’t write off Windows Vista just yet.

Defragmenting a Mac OS X hard disk

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Apple claims that OS X is the world’s most advanced operating system. If that’s the case, then why does it lack basic system utilities? That’s a rhetorical question, but I’ve written before about OS X’s lack of a decent backup utility and today (including most of tonight – hence the time of this post) I fell foul of its inability to defragment hard disks.

“ah… but you don’t need a defragmentation utility with OS X because it automatically defragments as it goes.”

[insert name of just about any Macintosh support forum here]

Wrong.

OS X defragments files, but not the disk itself (for an explaination as to what that really means and as to whether it’s really necessary, refer to Randy B Singer’s Mac OS X maintenance and troubleshooting guide). This inability to perform what should be a basic operating system function (even Windows has the capability) has cost me a lot of time today. In fairness, there is a third party utility availabilty (if I was prepared to pay for it), called iDefrag (Paul Stamatiou has a review of iDefrag on his site) but in the end, I used Mike Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my hard disk to my backup drive, make that bootable, repartition my system disk, and then clone the drive back again – a pretty long winded approach to defragmentation.

Still, every cloud has a silver lining… at least this process led me to discover the the Mac OS X maintenance and troubleshooting guide that I referred to earlier… well worth a read.

Has the Leopard lost it’s spots?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

If you read many Apple or Mac OS X forums, magazines or listen to Mac-related podcasts, soon enough you’ll come across a comment about how Windows Vista was late to market, only just competes with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and how OS X 10.5 (Leopard) will rewrite history and further boost Apple’s growth. Some of the podcasts I listen to even expected Apple to release Leopard at MacWorld in January and therefore beat Vista to market. Well, Leopard wasn’t ready at MacWorld (why would Apple rush it to market just to “beat Microsoft”, especially as Vista was already available to Microsoft’s business customers at that time?) – all Apple announced at MacWorld 2007 were some products that weren’t ready yet (although the Apple TV and AirPort Extreme have since begun shipping).

For a while now, Apple has said that Leopard will arrive in the spring 2007. Well, spring is here, and there is no sign of Leopard but when exactly does spring end? I could be generous and assume that the second quarter of the year counts as spring and maybe Leopard, iLife, iPhone, a new iSight camera and updates to the Macintosh and iPod product lines will be launched at Apple’s worldwide developer conference in June. Nope. Leopard will be late. Except in the southern hemisphere, where it will be spring in October. Yes, October. Now, I’m no Microsoft apologist (although some of my friends may disagree) but I do feel an element of smugness here as the same Apple fanboys who poured scorn on Windows Vista weep while they have to wait until the autumn (at least) for a new version of OS X.

To Apple: shame on you. I’m not sure whether to be more annoyed that you dropped the ball and let down your existing customer base in order to enter the highly-competitive smartphone market with an unproven product or that you are hiding behind the development of the iPhone in a crude attempt to mask the hypocrisy of criticising Microsoft’s incessant delays on Vista then delaying your own operating system update.

100 million iPod sales is a fantastic achievement, as is the resurgence in Apple’s computer sales but, by introducing uncertainty into the market, delaying releases of Mac-related products and failing to ship a new generation of iPods in order to follow a dream of becoming a consumer electronics giant, Apple risks losing it all. If they don’t get their act together soon then the winners will be Microsoft (PC operating systems), Nokia (phones) and Sony (consumer electronics).

Even before Apple announced that Leopard would not ship until October, there were rumours that all is not well in Cupertino – in TWiT episode 94 it was even suggested that the reason for the delays is not actually a lack of resources but actually because Steve Jobs is personally involved in so many of the decisions at Apple and only has limited time himself. An interesting theory (there were others too that I hold less credence in).

From a personal perspective, I’ve been considering a new Mac purchase and was looking at Leopard to see if it’s worth waiting for – even before this announcement I’d been preparing to blog about Leopard because my conclusion is that it’s probably not worth the wait. It looks to have some nice features but it doesn’t seem to offer much at all that’s ground breaking and I very much doubt that it can live up to Apple’s claims of “advancing the world’s most advanced operating system”. Now, before I get flamed, I’ll set out why I don’t see what the fuss is about, based on the Leopard Sneak Peek on the Apple website:

  • Time Machine. Looks good. Very pretty. Windows has had a backup utility since the mid-1990s (Apple make you pay for theirs) and has had the volume shadow copy service (VSS) for snapshots since Windows XP too – not as pretty as Time Machine but present in the operating system nevertheless.
  • Mail and iCal. The first new Mail features that Apple cites are based around HTML stationary, which either looks nice or tacky (depending on your point of view) but is pretty pointless as any decent mail client will block images in HTML mail for security reasons (at least until the message can be confirmed as safe). iCal’s collaboration functionality sounds good but in my experience the majority of non-geek users struggle to get any further at collaboration than e-mailing documents to one another. As for Notes and To Dos – have you ever heard of Outlook or Entourage? They may not be part of the operating system but let’s face it there aren’t many PCs in the world that don’t have Office on them. Regardless, I’ll concede that Mail and iCal are already better than their Windows equivalents.
  • Anti-phishing improvements in Mail and Safari. Check – already there in Windows, whether you use Internet Explorer or Firefox.
  • iChat. Fair enough – it is a great IM client and the new presentation features are miles ahead what the competition offers but in order to use the iChat audio-visual features with non-iChat contacts there are a lot of hoops to jump through, and getting iChat to talk to certain IM networks is difficult too.
  • Spaces. Something similar has been there on Linux for as long as I’ve used it (which, admittedly, is not very long) and the technology is already available for Mac OS X using VirtueDesktops. It’s a pity that Apple pulled up the rug from under Tony Arnold’s feet rather than making him an offer he couldn’t refuse, although the Leopard implementation does look pretty cool.
  • Dashboard. Nice. Should widgets be on a separate desktop or at the side of the screen? I guess that depends on your preference – personally I prefer the Apple implementation but I already have it in OS X 10.4 – either way, widgets weren’t invented by Apple (or Microsoft). As for users creating their own widgets… hmm… that’s sounds like a way to inject something nasty into my system (at the very least, user-generated widgets are unlikely to be frugal with system resources).
  • Spotlight. I hope it’s better than in Tiger – at the moment the productivity gurus recommend Quicksilver instead.
  • Accessibility. I understand that accessibility is a legal requirement (maybe that is just for websites). Maybe one day we’ll have a computer that can speak without sounding like a computer. Sorry but that new “Alex” voice still sounds very synthetic.
  • 64-bit. We’ve had 64-bit support for Windows since XP (albeit with limited driver support) and it’s been around in Linux for a while too; however the main advantage of 64-bit processing is access to more memory and unless we get some more Macs that support more than 2-3GB (at the time of writing, only the Mac Pro can use more than 3GB), what’s the big deal?
  • Core Animation. I’m not a developer but I understand all the core-* technologies are a method of exposing functionality to developers in a way that encourages simple application development. Is that like the Microsoft.NET framework or Java then?

Now I’m not saying that Windows is better than Mac OS X. That would be a purely subjective view; what I will say is that, even though I still use computers running Windows and Linux, my personal preference is to use my Mac as much as possible (probably just because it’s the computer with the large display, two processing cores and 2GB of memory, rather than any operating system considerations). Even so, I guess it means that I’m still a switcher – as is Kevin Ridgway, who thinks that people who prefer Windows are dumb. I just think this whole “my operating system is better than yours” nonsense is pointless and am disappointed that Apple has sunk to that level in their (admittedly rather funny) advertising. As for Kevin’s assertion that the latest version of OS X will be “an even more enticing reason to make the switch”, I just can’t see it.

Incidentally, for those who favour a third way (i.e. not Microsoft or Apple), a new version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution was released today…

Running VMware Server Console on a Mac

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last year, I bought a 20″ wide-screen monitor which I run at a resolution of 1680×1050 pixels. Working with all that screen space is fantastic (especially with 4 virtual desktops), except that I’ve got so used to it that the standard 1024×768 pixels on the notebook PC that I use for work seems too small and an upgrade is out of the question as the PC is only 18 months old.

For a while now, I’ve been running the notebook on the desk next to my main display but I’m running out of desk space. As I virtualised my corporate Windows XP build a while back, I thought it would be great if, when I’m working at home, I could run the Linux VMware Server Console on my Mac (which is connected to the large display). The virtual machine would still be limited to 1024×768 but I could access corporate applications in the VMware Server Console and do the big screen stuff (web, e-mail, document edits, etc.) natively on the Mac, using the whole display. Yes, I know that if I used Microsoft Virtual Server I could run it in a browser, but I’d need ActiveX and I’m not using Internet Explorer. Similarly RDP is an option, but I find it to be a bit flaky on an Intel Mac. Anyway, I’m a (pseudo-)geek and so I need to feed on problems like this from time to time!

Actually, much of the hard work has already been done for me – googling for vmware console mac soon turns up Rui Carmo’s article at The Tao of Mac on how to run [the VMware Console] remotely with Apple’s X11; however Rui’s article was written a while ago now and my VMware Server (v1.0.1-build 29996) installation on Fedora Core 5 doesn’t use the command vmware-console – instead I have to use vmware. Nevertheless, it got me 90% of the way there:

  • On the (Linux) VMware Server:
    • Configure SSH and X11 forwarding (my original post used a Windows client and public/private keys but the principles are similar – this time I used password authentication, making sure that the PasswordAuthentication yes and X11Forwarding yes lines were present in /etc/ssh/sshd_config and restarting the SSH daemon with service sshd restart).
    • Locate an appropriate keyboard map in /usr/lib/vmware/xkeymap/, edit the map if necessary (there is a VMware article about keyboard mapping on a Linux host that may be useful – don’t worry that it’s a VMware Workstation document) and edit ~/.vmware/preferences to include xkeymap.language="keyboardmap" (I used gb101 for my Apple UK keyboard).
  • On the Mac:

At this point VMware Server Console ran successfully under X11 on my Mac; however whenever I powered on a virtual machine all I saw was a black screen and a message in the xterm window which read:

X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication.

After trying a remote VMware Server Console connection to localhost and restarting the Linux host (I’m not sure which, if either, of these made a difference) I found that the virtual machine was actually starting but that for some reason the display wasn’t being repeated in the X11 VMware Server Console on the Mac; however this time there was a different message displayed:

Unable to connect to the MKS: You need execute access in order to connect with the VMware Server Console. Access denied for config file: /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/virtualmachinenname/virtualmachinenname.vmx.

After setting execute permissions to the virtual machine configuration file chmod +x virtualmachinenname.vmx (changing the permission set from 640 to 751), I was able to successfully view the VM on the Mac (and simultaneously on the Linux host) – the only (very minor) issues are that the mouse pointer is solid white when accessing the virtual machine (so sometimes I lose it) and that the sound is not forwarded (no big deal). Now my notebook PC is docked on a shelf away from the desk, with the lid closed, and I’m running the VMware Server Console from the Mac, having reclaimed some space on my desk.

Creating a FAT32 volume in excess of 32GB

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few months back I wrote about some of the issues I was having with using FAT32-formatted disks for data transfer between Windows, Mac OS X (and Linux) PCs, because although FAT32 supports file systems up to 2TB in size, the format utilities within Windows support a maximum partition size of 32GB and FAT32 only supports files up to 4GB (which doesn’t sound like an issue until you start copying .ISO DVD images and digital video files around).

Even though I use MacDrive for reading OS X disks on Windows XP, I still find it useful to have a FAT32 disk to back up the VMware Server virtual machine which I use to run Windows XP on a Linux notebook PC for my daily work. I did find a great utility a few weeks back for reading ext3 disks on Windows (I think it was Explore2fs), but it’s the universal acceptance of FAT32 that makes it so easy to use everywhere. The trouble is that my virtual machine is about 31GB in size and growing – consequently I needed to create a partition larger than 32GB.

In my original post, I mentioned that FAT32 volumes in excess of 32Gb can be created – Windows is able to read or write larger volumes it just can’t create them natively (the workaround is to use another operating system or third-party tools). In my case, I used the Mac OS X Disk Utility – the important point is to ensure that the disk options are set to use as master boot record (not a GUID partition table or an Apple partition map) after which MS-DOS File System becomes available as a formatting option, allowing me to create a FAT32 disk which filled my entire 55.89GB disk – plenty of room for my virtual machine files and more.

ThinkBook? MacPad?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Firstly, let me point out that I am not publicly condoning software piracy. To run Apple Mac OS X 10.4 on anything other than a properly licensed Macintosh computer would be very, very naughty.

If, however, you did have a spare copy of OS X and you wanted to install it on a well-built black notebook PC (say, for example, an IBM ThinkPad T40) without shelling out extra cash for a black MacBook, this is how you might do it. I’m not sure if the end result should be known as a ThinkBook or a MacPad…

Following Profit42’s advice for installing OS X 10.4.x on a “normal” PC (and assuming that all data on the target computer’s hard disk can be wiped):

  1. Make sure that the target computer supports at least the SSE2 instruction set (if you are running Windows then CPU-Z will help).
  2. Obtain a pre-patched OS X install DVD image (available to Apple developers… although I understand that googling for JaS OSx86 may help out a little…).
  3. Burn the OS X install image (e.g. 10.4.6.install.dvd.iso) to DVD.
  4. Boot the target computer from the DVD and press a key when prompted to install OS X.
  5. After the grey screen with the Apple logo, follow the installer prompts until there is a blue screen and a menu bar at the top. At this point select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
  6. Create a single partition on the disk formatted as Mac OS X extended (journaled). Then close Disk Utility.
  7. Continue with the installer prompts, customising the installation after selecting the target hard disk and ensuring that all appropriate patches are selected (e.g. 10.4.6.Combo.Update, Intel.SSE2 and 10.4.6.Radeon.Mobility.Support).
  8. Continue until the installation is complete and reboot into OS X.

If presented with a b0 error message, then there are a couple of methods to work around this. The basic problem is that the partition has not been set active (bootable). Live CDs such as GParted (or even an MS-DOS boot disk with FDISK) may help but one method is to boot from the install DVD again but this time don’t press a key. OS X should boot and once set up it should be possible to launch Terminal (from the Utilities folder, under Applications) and set the appropriate partition to be active, following the advice from Rammjet at Insanely Mac:

  1. Type diskutil list and verify which disk holds the OS X partition.
  2. Assuming that the disk is disk0, enter the command sudo fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0 (note the r in rdisk) and enter your password when prompted.
  3. Ignore the fdisk: could not open MBR file /usr/standalone/i386/boot0: No such file or directory error.
  4. At the fdisk: 1> prompt, type p and verify which partition holds OS X.
  5. Assuming that it is partition 1, type f 1 – the response should be Partition 1 marked active and the prompt should change to fdisk:*1>.
  6. Save the changes with write then enter y to confirm that a restart will be required, followed by exit.
  7. Remove the install DVD and reboot.

Finally: