Rubénerd!

Now that Ruben has his MacBook Pro back, he decided to try a new "theme" kinda thing.

While he thought Bakemonogatari was an interesting show, what he really did love were the graphics and character designs, and while Sengoku Nadeko wasn't his favourite spirit-possessed character, the colours in this background were too gorgeous to pass up. As a bonus, they match really well with Terminal.app's "Red Sands" theme which he'd never used before. They're all like the colours from Ubuntu... only classy!

As a matter of disclosure, Ruben uses Sabayon and Fedora as his Linux distros of choice, and only talks about himself in the Third Person occasionally. Like a boss.

After a couple of months in mothballs, starting today MacTheKnife has been recommissioned for full service! I know, exciting right!?

Wait, don't answer that

Since iMugi the Mac Pro entered the picture to take care of the heavy lifting and Senjoughara the ThinkPad X40 was used for mobile work, MacTheKnife the 2006 MacBook Pro was relegated to secondary duties. This wasn't helped by the fact his battery was completely shot, and when Ruben's sister stole his power supply after she damaged hers, he couldn't even be turned on!

Yesterday though MacTheKnife got some new stuff, and as we speak he's with Ruben in a coffee shop typing this infuriatingly written third person blog post! He received a brand new battery and 85W MagSave power supply from the Apple Store on George Street in Sydney which means Ruben won't be able to eat for a month, but now he can use his Mac laptop again!

Ugh I just realised that lineup doesn't include my homebrew file server. Oh well, its not well designed like these anyway :P.

Blastie from the pastie. Mmm, pastie

Ruben bought his venerable, first generation MacBook Pro in March 2006, as denoted by a blog post discussing the then-new Intel/PPC Universal Binary situation (Universal Binaries for Mozilla Software). He ran Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger at the time, what a blast from the past!

Speaking of blast passing (wait, what?) Ruben was living in Malaysia at the time so the movie and concert tickets, CD covers and random coffee shop paraphernalia wedged between the lid and the clear perspex cover are like a time capsule into his life in 2006-07! Ruben thinks that while that's cool in a way, ideally MacTheKnife should receive a bit of an upgrade. For one thing, there needs to be a seriously large Ho-Kago Tea Time cover alongside the Blues Brothers and SOS-Dan ones (too much epicness?), and the ticket from when Ruben saw Bebel Gilberto, at the very least!

MacTheKnife has had a thorough screen cleaning, a new key chair for the S keycap installed so it doesn't wiggle in that irritating way, a thorough polishing of his discrete-construction aluminium enclosure, and a compete reinstallation of OS X Snow Leopard from scratch, just to be nice and clean and fresh and new and lovely :).

Ruben also has some BIG plans! Now that MacTheKnife isn't Ruben's primary production machine now and is more of a portable workstation thingy, he doesn't need a massive internal drive any more and can probably swap it out for an SSD. He's also going to try finding a replacement keyboard cover, and removing the SuperDrive completely. He never uses it, and it just makes the unit heavier. Finally, he'd love if he could replace the hulking ugly closed Telstra NextG Sierra Wireless dongle with an internal ExpressCard/34 to make things neater, but he's not holding his breath.

Finally, Ruben thinks this post has gone on long enough, so he will cease!

Each morning I get out of bed, check batteries, have a shower, check batteries, brush my teeth, check batteries. While going through this morning's ritual I stopped dead in my tracks, not because I had run out of battery power, but because of a realisation: I don't own these batteries, these batteries own me.

I always forget to plug them in

I'm one of these obsessive people who has to have his computers doing things while he's asleep, generally either compiling huge FreeBSD ports or doing some heavy file compression. I can't really do these tasks during the day because I need my machine so I can follow along with the lecturer's dull university PowerPoint presentations with three hundred words crammed into each slide, amongst other production needs.

Blu-Ray anime needs a heck of a lot of processing power to play. Wait, you didn't read that.

What I try my best to do is charge batteries while I sleep for the same reason, but I nearly always forget to charge something, which entails a frantic mad dash in the mornings to plug them in so I can get at least a 20% charge before I have to run out the door. I'm notorious for doing this with my iTelephone which is even worse given I use it as an alarm clock.

Then there are batteries I have that are so shot as to be useless in any practical sense. As I blogged back in January, despite being the forth one I've bought since 2006 the battery in my MacBook Pro barely holds enough charge to keep the machine running if I unplug it to take it to another room. It has single-handedly justified the existence of my tiny ThinkPad X40 which I take to all my classes. Ironically I bought this machine with it's original battery second hand for peanuts and I can still get a solid three hours out of it!

Where are my jetpacks and ultracapacitors?

I'm doing computer science and information technology not computer engineering so I'm ill equipped to discuss this topic, but I was under the impression even as late as last year that ultracapacitors were going to take over the world and give us lightweight super high capacity energy that could charge so fast you'd blow every fuse and circuit within a few hundred kilometres. Alas here I am still with heavy, bulky batteries.

Do you have a regime for recharging your batteries? Do you do the recommended full discharge once a week? Why did I think of that episode of Futurama where Honest Bender disposes of the toxic waste into the mutant's underground world when I asked that previous question?

Having just spoken about photography, a few hours ago Apple released Aperture 3. One thing of note is the white box instead of black, shock of horrors! Of note for my own personal circumstances was the phrasing of the system requirements:

Aperture 3, which runs as a 64-bit application on Intel Core 2 Duo Macs running Mac OS X Snow Leopard [...]

I've been saying on this blog for years that my 2006-vintage Core Duo MacBook Pro still works and does everything I need it to, but perhaps this is a sign that it's the end of the road for it as far as Apple is concerned. Perhaps this means Mac OS X 10.7 will only be 64-bit as well; could Snow Leopard be the latest OS X I'll be able to run on it?

I thought it was very odd that they timed the transition to Intel only months before the 64-bit Core 2 Duo processor, so they've had to support those precious few 32-bit machines like mine when they could have been entirely x64 from the start. If this is the start of 64-bit only applications at Apple, I applaud them for it; despite having a 32-bit MacBook Pro, the vast majority of the install base is 64-bit and machines like mine are weighing everybody else down.

Interim transition time?

Perhaps this may be the excuse I need to start rebooting into my FreeBSD partition on this MacBook Pro on a more regular basis to get used to it in anticipation of no more updates! I know it's not politically correct to admit it but I adore The Gimp, now I just need a photo management application that isn't some terrible Mono .NET thing.

When I finally got around to installing the new VMware Fusion 3.0 update I downloaded yesterday I expected to get a slight performance improvement for my FreeBSD guests, but not as much as I would have got had I been running a Windows guest. The VMware Mac team have made it clear in their advertising they consider Fusion to be a product to run Windows on your Mac, and while other operating systems such as FreeBSD and Linux are supported, they're not a priority. I'm really pleased and relieved to say I was wrong!

Aside from one minor glitch which I'll describe below, the improvements for FreeBSD guests under VMware Fusion 3.0 have been huge. Given I imagine the market for people running this OS in their product must be tiny I really appreciate them putting in this effort.

First of all, its faster. Not "OMG I Just Got A New Computer!" faster, but extracting archives such as a portsnap image and booting the machine in the first place takes less time.

The biggest usability change though is more seamless X11 integration. As you could with Windows guests (and perhaps Linux ones, not sure) before, you can capture and release control of your mouse pointer between the FreeBSD guest and Mac host as if the VM was just a regular Mac window. This means you don't need to enter a key combination to "break out" which makes it infinitely more usable.

The only one downside that still lingers from VMWare Fusion 2.x is the software's continued reliance on the compat6x port if you want to run the latest stable version of FreeBSD which is currently 7.2. There's probably an architectural reason why this is, but it'd be nice if I didn't need to install a compatibility layer and set of libraries for a legacy earlier version of my OS to get the Fusion Additions. That said, once this is installed the Additions perform flawlessly.

To sum up, the performance difference combined with the vastly improved and seamless experience with X11 means I can run FreeBSD in full screen on my MacBook Pro for my studies and general messing around without having to reboot my machine and use Boot Camp. I believe the term I'm looking for is: awesome!

Thank you VMware guys, you've made me a really happy camper :).

Without home internet and the huge difficulties I've already eluded to with publishing blog posts from the university computer pools I didn't think I could be bothered going through the rigmarole (sounds like a dip), but this warranted the effort. This entire post summarised in one line: the new MacBook Pro inverter I ordered arrived, and it fixed the dead screen problem! I have my travel companion back!

Inverter for the Introvert, sounds like a sitcom title

After worrying that it might not work after I ordered it all the way from the States, I finally had some time yesterday evening to install the new display inverter in my discrete construction MacBook Pro. It took well over an hour to deconstruct the machine and the display assembly, but when I plugged it all back in again and turned it on the screen lit up again for the first time in weeks! Success!

It seems the Snow Leopard MacBook Pro black screen issue some people have had was a complete coincidence, for my machine it was a hardware problem that stuck around after rebooting and installing other OSs. If you've had the same problem with your MacBook Pro where the screen backlight refuses to turn on, you could have a shot inverter too.

I ordered my replacement inverter (Apple ID 922-7191) from PowerbookMedic.com and could not have been happier with their service.

Thoughts

This was the very first portable Intel Mac model ever shipped back in 2006, it has a 32bit Core Duo CPU with a maximum of 2GiB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM. It was starting to feel its age with Leopard, but with Snow Leopard its felt much "snappier" while executing regular desktop tasks and I thought I could perhaps extend the life of it a bit longer. When the screen died I had started to think planned obsolescence was kicking in!

In fact this machine does something that the current generation 15" MacBook Pro can't: accept ExpressCards. Given how critical they are to my workflow (added FireWire 800 and eSATA ports, wireless modems, 8 in 1 card readers, a super fast solid state drive) I'm hoping Apple reimplements them in their next hardware refresh for the 15" line, then I'll upgrade. In the meantime, this machine is once again performing its duties well :).

In the meantime I'll be looking into upgrading the internal hard drive to a 500GB one and perhaps even swap out the optical drive for another internal hard drive. Having 1TB of internal storage in a notebook would be fantabulous. Fantabulous sounds like a brand of grilled cheese sandwiches. Wait, no it doesn't.

I have my venerable MacBook Pro back, and I'm so happy ^_^.

Yesterday I talked about how my MacBook Pro's screen backlight seemed to have died. It's as if the brightness has been set to 0 and no amount of keyboard button pressing or changing the brightness slider in the Display prefpane made any difference. If I shine a torch at the screen I can just barely make out a picture though, which led me to believe it wasn't the display itself that was dead.

I contacted an Apple support representative this morning and described the symptoms and initially he wanted to know if I'd installed Snow Leopard. Turns out some people's MacBooks and MacBook Pros from 2006 have been having problems with black screens, but that a restart fixed it. Unfortunately I had already rebooted several times and reset the PRAM and PMU with no effect but because I could still make out images on the display he told me it was probably an issue with the inverter board and not the display.

This seems to echo what iFixIt says:

My screen looks black, but I can see very faint graphics on it.

Symptoms of this are a dark screen, but everything else seems to be running. If you get in close with a flashlight, you can usually see the image faintly.

If your backlight isn't working, the inverter may be bad. Other parts that may be bad are the display or the logic board. If your backlight fails intermittently while moving the display, the problem is with the inverter cables.

I try to see the positive side to everything (even if most of the time I fail miserably) so I'm just glad it's not a problem with the display itself or the graphics chip which would have cost well over a thousand dollars to fix. A replacement inverter is less than $50, but apparently they're very complicated to install, so I'm going to drop it off at the Apple repair centre in the city on Monday and (for want of a better phrase) count my blessings. I could try to fix it myself, but I don't want to end up with more problems!

The timing could not have been worse, but there you go.

When I turned on my first generation Core Duo MacBook Pro I got in early 2006 this evening the backlight refuses to turn on using the function keys on the keyboard. All other keyboard functions are fine.

If I shine a torch at the screen I can just barely make out the windows and can adjust the brightness slider in the Display prefpanel, but nothing happens. Using an external monitor I can use the machine, but the internal display is still black.

Not sure whether this is a problem with Snow Leopard, I sure as heck hope so but it's looking increasingly unlikely. I didn't have the backlight Snow Leopard installation problem, but could this be related?

Things I've tried so far and have failed:

1. Resetting the PRAM (three times)
2. Resetting the PMU

This is really serious. I need to take this machine to classes. If it's a hardware failure and I can only use an external display, I'm in big trouble.

I often find I can understand things better myself when I explain what I'm attempting to do. Spock would probably say this illogical, I'd retort that not all of us have the benefit of being half Vulcan. Thank you.

Since attempting to boot my MacBook Pro with OpenSolaris and since writing about it here an hour ago I've learned more about the problem I was having with the partitioning stage.

I found this page and on their instruction I installed the Sun Device Detection Tool which checks the hardware of machines and determines whether or not OpenSolaris and Solaris have appropriate driver support. Aside from the gigabit Ethernet card, I was told my original generation MacBook Pro had full hardware support. Cool.

Returning to the aforementioned page I saw the screenshot shown above and recognised the errors instantly from when I tried to install OpenSolaris myself. Turns out OpenSolaris needs to be installed on the first partition to work; I was attempting to install it on the third partition after the EFI and Mac OS X Leopard ones respectively.

I could mess around for another few hours to try and figure out how to overcome this limitation (when I was an early teenager I was quite the dual-booting wizard) but I'm thinking I'll save myself the headache, backup my data and repartition this machine from scratch.

As I said in my previous post about this, this semester I'm working almost exclusively with Java and Oracle software and I'm SSH'ing into Solaris machines at the campus here already, and I'd like to be able to use a similar setup on my own machine too. Also I love trying new things :).

Given I'm working almost exclusively with Java and Oracle software this semester at university in three of my four courses I thought it'd be fun and worthwhile dual-booting OpenSolaris with Mac OS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro and use them both in a more "native" environment. You can download the ISOs for free from their servers, via bittorrent or you can even order a CD to be sent to you gratis. Pretty cool.

Problem is, I'm stuck. I'm attempting to install OpenSolaris 2009.06 which is the latest version at the time this post is going live. These were the steps I took:

1. Ran Leopard Bootcamp
2. Rebooted with the OpenSolaris disc in the drive
3. Chose the default LiveCD option from the Grub menu
4. Arrived at the desktop, connected to Wireless network
5. Plugged in USB mouse because internal trackpad wasn't detected
6. Launched installer
7. Chose the FAT32 partition Bootcamp generated, selected "Solaris"

Barely a few seconds into file copying stage, the installer #fails (uh oh I've started inadvertently using Twitter hashtags in regular blog entries, this does not bode well for my mental state!). When I clicked the log file button these were the last few errors:

>> Could not crate VTOC target
>> TI process failed.

I thought it could have had something to do with ZFS specifically, but doing some research online I came across this discussion thread where Basant suggests the problem is with the EFI partitioning scheme employed by Bootcamp.

Prime cause why it was failing was because of EFI partition. After I reset the partition id of EFI partition (#1) using "setpid 1to AF" and rebooted, my problem went away and opensolaris installed and booted just fine. I had also marked the partition as Active from Linux fdisk command so I didn't need to do the fdisk.real hack.

The fdisk.real hack being referred to turns out to be this official workaround in response to a recognised bug in OpenSolaris.

Going to take another plunge, here's hoping one of these tricks does the... trick.