Apple Apple Apple...

Extended time with 2 27" iMacs and a 15" MacBook Pro; what I learned...

So I recently spent a couple of days setting up a couple of huge iMacs and a MacBook. And it was actually pretty fun. The iMac is a beautiful piece of engineering and the display is gorgeous. But the really money was finally being able to bind a OSX based machine to the domain here at work, get all the required software and connections working and have it all happen in a relatively short amount of time. I was also able to document everything so I have a reference for next time or for the "other guy" who doesn't have a clue what to do in this environment (I was that "other guy", thrust into the midst of chaos and no one knows what to do). I got some experience with installing MS Office 2008 for the Mac, Parallels Desktop 5 (with a Windows XP guest OS), and the lousy but necessary campus AV package (McAffee). I was also able to bypass the lame Cisco VPN connection they enforce here by just setting up a VPN connection in OSX (I also was able to do this in Windows 7). At last, no 'extra' software to connect to a VPN when it's built right into the OS. Binding to the domain (a Windows Active Directory environment) was pretty simple and I applaud Apple for making it that way. The easier it is to integrate with you competitor, the less grief for the consumer.

I am no Apple sympathizer, but they can make some beautiful equipment. Now if Microsoft gets in on system design, it would be an interesting turn of events (they already have Microsoft stores... but for how long, who knows). Either way, the only 2 drawbacks, to me anyway, are the pricing and program compatibility (ie GAMES). There is value in the pricing, but it's still out of reach for many, and a waste of money for many. I still bend to the latter though process. The games aspect is shrinking slowly. Many games, especially those from independent developers, have Mac ports, and I think as time goes on, we'll see a majority of games playable on both Windows and Mac platforms... if the current trends continue. That's the only question on many developers minds.

Eh, anyway, it was fun to mess with them. I did miss a 2nd mouse button. The new Apple mouse came with the iMacs and they were pretty interesting (multi-touch devices). I did like the integration of the bluetooth(?) keyboard and mouse. No setup whatsoever and I had 2 iMacs side-by-side.

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Creative Relief

Well after a lot and not enough thought, I decided to remove XP from my eeePC. Now as it stands, my Hard Drive is divided thusly... around 10G for XP, then 20G for OSX, 80G for 7, and the rest is an extended partition with a 8G Logical mounted at /, a 20G Logical mounted at /home and a 2G Swap Partition. In that order on the drive.

So in order to do this, I am removing the first Partition, and bumping everything towards the from, expanding as I go along. So after much consideration, I popped in my trusted Gparted Live disc (0.4.4.1) and went to work. I deleted the XP Partition, Move the OSX to the front, tried to resized it but later found out it is not possible while Journaling is enabled. So I left the 8G partition alone (RAW) and resized the 80G 7 partition to 70G, and expanded the Extented Partition 10G, Moved everything to the front, enlarging the /Home partition 10G. After not thinking, I hit the Apply button and and hour and a half later, it finished with 3 warnings. But warnings are for suckers and upon reboot, my grub menu popped up. No way, this is to good to be true. OSX booted fine, Ubuntu booted fine, but 7 did not. So, having been this route before, I eeked out a plan. First I booted into Ubuntu and edited my grub menu.lst. It used to say hda 0,0 but since I want to boot off of the 7 partition instead of the XP I changed that to 0,2 (OSX being 0 and 1 being that blank partition).... upon reading what i just wrote, I'll probably have to change it from 2 to 1 after I merge the OSX partition with the blank one, but let's not get ahead of oourselves. So I did that, popped in the 7 disc, booted up, went to Repair Windows. It asked to do some automatice repairs, I let it. It reboots. I boot off of the disc again, click Repair Windows, Select Startup Repair, let it do its thing and BAM, reboots, I let grub come up, and select Windows 7... And it works. EVERYTHING ACTUALLY WORKS. Even better, since XP is gone, I don't see another boot loader. Everything is going according to plan.

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One caveat I'm noticing about multi-booting my eeePC is that Windows 7 will work fine no matter what, but if I boot into 7 and then restart and boot into Ubuntu, I lose sound, the only remedy is shutting down and starting up again. If I boot into 7 and then restart into OSX I lose mouse/trackpad functionality again only remedied with a shutdown and startup. Weird but since that's the only thins I can see that is causing it, I'm good.
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Now let's see If I can screw up resizing the OSX partition...

So I boot into OSX and open up the Disk Utility and, following instructions I found on the web, I click the OSX partition and then click the File menu and look for Disbale Journaling. Greyed out. So still following the web advice, I open a terminal and do the following:

cd /Volumes/
ls

it spits out this:
Apple OS X Leopard Windows 7

so I counter witha diskutil uppercut:
sudo diskutil enableJournal Apple\ OS\ X\ Leopard/
(yes you need all those "\" when you have spaces in the name of your hard drive)

it replies saying, it's already enabled , dawg.
I'm just following instructions. I respond with
sudo diskutil disableJournal Apple\ OS\ X\ Leopard/

and it's disabled. I pop in my trustyl Gparted Live disc and reboot... and apparantly It can't resize HSF+ partitions. After some careful reading, it seem I need to boot up off of my mac osx disc. I'll try that later.

Late

**** UPDATE ****

I guess you can't grow HSF+ Partitions, only shrink or delete. Lame. or is it? First person to show me how to do it, well, I'll make you famous... semi-famous anyhow.

Late

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Just a few things on the mind...

Well, first off, anyone who touts that the Blackberry Storm is superior, or even preferred, over an iPhone is smoking some serious chronic, shooting heroin, and freebasing his brain into a stupor.  This is coming from a guy with a slight (it's getting better) bias against Apple.  I have spent a couple of days here at work trying to get a guys Storm to communicate with our Exchange server.  Due to security issues with our server I couldn't get it to work just yet, but the touch screen is a pain to deal with, it's slow (not slow-slow, but sluggish), and is overall a piece of crap, compared to the iPhone.  Now if this thing came out 3 or 4 years ago, it may have had a place in history, but as soon as the iPhone would appear it would be forgotten in time.  I never want to get my hands on a Storm ever again, at least the 1G ones.  Hopefully they will fix these issues with the 2G or hopefully no one here will buy one for me to configure ever again.

I'm still having fun with my eeePC.  And wouldn't you know it?  The two OS's I'm using the most right now are Ubuntu 9.04 and OSX Leopard.  SHOCKING.  I've really had to learn OSX as we support a few systems and I recently formatted an old PowerBook G4 (677MHZ PowerPC Processor, 512M SD RAM) and loaded it up with OSX Tiger.  I have to hand it to Apple, they made pretty things even way back in 2002.  Look at any Windows based notebook from that era and wretch.  Using Leopard on my eeePC, I've installed some handy apps to read NTFS hard drives that have made my life so much easier (MacFUSE and NTFS-3G, both free/open source).  Now if i could find some games that would be enjoyable and run on the eeePC.

On the Windows 7 front, it will be released this Fall/Winter Late 2009.  That's pretty awesome, since it is a pretty awesome OS.  Just shy of 3 years since Vista.  For once Microsoft beat its own forecast, but expect Windows 8 either in 3 years or 6 depending on if they scrap 2 years of development like they did before Vista.  Both OS run great at the moment (as they are pretty much 1st cousins if not siblings.)  so don't give me any of that "Vista SuX" nonsense.  You only show how ignorant and biased you are to the rest of us... unless you are running Vista on a old, pre 2005 machine... then I'll let you slide... but remember, Vista wasn't made for you.

I'm  playing a lot of Fallout 3 lately.  I'm actually enjoying myself immensely and dreading the ending which will show up all to soon.  There is a lot of downloadable content available (free and pay) so we'll see if I continue past the prescribed ending, but I have a crap-load of games to play and since money is tight, it will force me (well not against my will) to play them instead of going ADD with my current library.

And on another awesome note.  Those who like Star Wars and are getting into the novels and then see the 22 book epic New Jedi Order and feel overwhelmed?  Well Dark Horse is putting those stories (well at least the era) into comic book form (which I believe they wanted to do all along, but then Lucas Books gave it to Del Ray to make novels) called INVASION.  It looks awesome.  Did I just saw awesome a bunch of times?  You bet I did.  Awesome like Transformers 2.

And yes, I did see Terminator:Salvation.  Great movie, I can totally recommend it.  Great story and action.  Go see it.  Need to see Star Trek, Wolverine, and then Transformers.... but probably just Transformers seeing as I'm broke.

Late.

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