I just started downloading the all new FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE from the FreeBSD bittorrent tracker and so should you! I’m more excited by this release than Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard from a few months back!
Don’t get me wrong, all this talk about Fedora lately hasn’t swayed me from my true calling. Heck, even this very website is running on FreeBSD ^_^.
My relative subjective view of sluggishness/performance on a ThinkPad X40. Shorter bars are better.
One of the most common uses for the Stacks feature on Leopard and Snow Leopard is to have an icon for the primary hard drive sitting in the Dock; it allows you to navigate most parts of the entire filesystem include user folders, applications and so on. Problem is, you need a separate icon for each drive.
This afternoon though I found a way to have one Stack icon for all your drives: drag the /Volumes folder onto the dock instead! /Volumes is the hidden folder on your Mac’s primary hard drive that contains the mounts for each of your other drives.
To unhide /Volumes so you can drag it onto the Dock:
/Volumes (including the forward slash) and hit ReturnUnfortunately, the bad news is List view just displays a series of aliases that launch in the Finder. If you use the Grid view on Snow Leopard though you can now navigate to all the folders on all your mounted drives with one icon.
It may come as complete shock to you to find out our first home computer from the early 1990s was a DOS machine. Certainly I’ve never mentioned this ever before on my blog here (cough!), and I certainly have never blogged about running DOS on modern hardware for nostalgic fun.
Turns out one of the unintended positives of procuring a ThinkPad X40 dating back to before IBM’s hardware division was purchased by Lenovo is that IBM were themselves a DOS vendor (an oversimplification of history but it’ll suffice) and supported running DOS well after everyone else jumped on the Windows bandwagon.
What this means is even for a 2004 vintage notebook computer from their download page they have complete DOS software for updating the BIOS and diagnosing problems along with drivers for networking, external optical drives, sound and their obscure, limited run USB grilled cheese sandwich waffle irons that came bundled with I’m so full of crap.
I’m stretched for time as is and probably won’t be able to test any of this out for a while, but I do have a licenced copy of IBM PC DOS 7 and a ThinkPad with drivers… it might be time to get my nostalgia freak on :).
It’s become a little tradition of mine to break in new operating system installs by tuning into Whole Wheat Radio before I do anything else (Low-Fi, Med-Fi, Hi-Fi). It’s useful because it tests both the sound card and more importantly the network.
When I installed the newly released Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro and got ready to install Audion to tune into the MP3Pro stream, it occurred to me that Audion is a PowerPC application. Snow Leopard is now an Intel only system, and while you can install Rosetta as an optional extra, the rabid system perfectionist inside of me cringes at the idea of installing an entire extra subsystem for only one application.
I’ve switched to QuickTime for now to play Whole Wheat on my Mac but because it doesn’t have the MP3Pro decoder the quality suffers. Unfortunately, I cannot find anyone still supporting MP3Pro on the Mac.
While the quality might not be as good as MP3Pro for the same stream size, at my house here in Adelaide where we have a strict download quota I generally only listen to the Med-Fi stream anyway so quality is less of a concern.
With this in mind, QuickTime 10 that came with Snow Leopard is fantastic, its brand new minimalistic UI is very unobtrusive and fast, and part of me really gets a kick out of being told I’m listening to a Live Broadcast :)
One of the great things about Whole Wheat Radio is you can also view who’s listening and where at the same time you are, along with what software they’re using to tune in with.
Because QuickTime is now an important architectural sublayer of Snow Leopard (a dedicated Mac developer may want to correct me on that) the user agent string for QuickTime and other software that utilises it’s resources (such as iTunes) is now a cryptic reference to the OS rather than to QuickTime.
I added information on this along with a screenshot to the Whole Wheat Radio wiki, Jim Kloss might want to just create a redirect instead to QuickTime or to the Mac pages but I figured it was worth explaining so at least there aren’t any red links on the who’s listening page.
It had to be said :).
With the introduction of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Apple has decided to disable graphical configuration of font smoothing. Fortunately, there is a workaround!
In Leopard and earlier versions of Mac OS X, if you opened System Preferences and chose Appearance, you could choose the level of font smoothing on your monitor with a handy drop down box.
For some reason, Apple decided in Snow Leopard to to disable graphical configuration of font smoothing aside from a single checkbox, instead relying on LCDs to report what settings should be used. The problem is, support for this is spotty and sometimes the results look terrible.
Fortunately you can still adjust this manually. Open the Terminal in your Utilities folder, then enter the following code on one line. Replace the "2" with a number between 1 and 4, depending on how much smoothing you want.
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2
The changes will only take effect on newly opened applications. The easiest way I’ve found is just to log out and log in again.
Heaven knows why Apple user interface designers decided to remove access to this feature.
My premininary experience with Snow Leopard after getting around to installing has been amazing. It’s most probably also to do with the fact I did a clean install which always helps, but all the applications load instantly or with only one dock bounce even on this 2006 era first generation MacBook Pro! Obviously compiling huge projects or editing video won’t be much faster, but if the machine is feeling this much more responsive I might be able to keep using it for even longer which my wallet will love.
There are also lots of tiny little non-performance related things. When you click the hide toolbar button in the Finder it does a quick animation, and the toolbar itself is spaced out more neatly. When I have my external monitor attached the open windows on it are easier to resize to fit the full height without going over. When you open folders in the Finder using column view they show an open icon. The Homebrew theme in the Terminal uses blue as a selection colour. I’m sure I’ll find more such things.
So far the only bad things I’ve come across is hard drives aren’t shown by default on the Desktop but a quick visit to the Finder Preferences screen can fix that. Also, for some reason the fonts look dreadful and the Appearance preference pane no longer has a drop down menu to select the degree of font smoothing. A visit to the Terminal will fix this, but it’s weird they’d do that.
Now it’s time to put the Dock back on the side and install my applications. Speaking of which I need a cup of coffee. Why doesn’t Snow Leopard do THAT for me still I ask?
After much anticipation my copy of Snow Leopard I pre-ordered back on Monday arrived in our mailbox early this morning. Of course Murphy’s Law was in full force: I had classes, a ton of assignments and work, I tagged along with my sister to the airport for her flight to Canberra and I set our toaster oven on fire when I tried to make a slice of toast and forgot about it. Imagine the damage if it had been a grilled cheese sandwich.
Well here we are at 23:30 and I finally have some time to install this here Snow Leopard. Problem is I absolutely loathe upgrades, I much prefer starting a new install of an operating system from scratch so there’s the lowest chance of something going wrong and it also forces me to do a thorough system clean out and to check the few files I don’t have backed up daily.
There probably won’t be many blog posts today while I frantically work on this here Snow Leopard install preparation, so you can take five. Speak of the devil, I’m listening to that now. Genius.
Oh bummer, one of my external hard drives is almost full already. This is going to be a long evening!
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:
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.
Because I require some software for my studies that only runs on Windows I went ahead and installed Windows 7 in a virtual machine on my MacBook Pro, fairly run of the mill kind of setup. Despite it being somewhat of a moot point given how low Windows Vista set the bar, I do admit Windows 7 is more stable, less irritating and somewhat faster. Unfortunately the Windows 7 Explorer and Start Menu are still just as messy, cluttered and confusing as their Vista counterparts.
This got me thinking then: wouldn’t it be great if it were somehow possible to merely swap in the explorer.exe file from Windows 2000 — the last version of Windows I believe had a genuinely usable interface — into Windows 7? You’d have the relative advantages of Windows 7 with the clean, uncluttered and classy interface of Windows 2000. Genius!
I figure though explorer.exe is probably a protected system file and requires any number of dll files and other dependencies that are scattered in that atrocious mess Windows refers to as the Windows and System32 folders, so it probably wouldn’t be possible. Bummer.
Hi! I'm Ruben Schade and this is my labour of love blog from beautiful Singapore and Sydney.
I also lurk on Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader and lots more places.
