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Some screenshots of OS X running on my Dell.

apple + phone = iPhone
MS + phone = oPhone.

Really funny:

Who doesn’t have a flash drive these days? I happen to have two 2 gb drives and one is permanently dangling on my keychain. Recently I was using my wife’s laptop and I installed firefox without confirming with her first; unfortunately that’s her work laptop and she wasn’t comfortable installing unauthorized software (why is FF still a pariah to most companies? They can save a ton of money they spend on security by switching to FF with some good plugins. Oh well). I luv using her shiny new laptop but I prefer to use some Open Source utilities while i am working (FF, Filezilla, PuTTY, Notepad++ and Foxit Reader); my alternative was looking for apps that don’t require installation. I remember coming across the portable apps concept but never bothered to check up on it. Now, thanks to the following list, I carry them on my USB and use it on all the laptops without bothering with the installation or copying it on to the hard drive. check it out…

List of portable software - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In the previous post I mentioned about the OS X installation on my XPS400 and the things to do. Yesterday, I got the sound working on the OS X thanks to InsanelyMac forums. It’s not the 5.1 channel the motherboard supports but I’ll live with stereo for now.

As for the wireless, I had to do couple of things to get the machine online. Since I was using an old Belkin F5D6050 USB adapter that refused to be identified in Mac, I decided to get a wireless bridge going similar to what I used to have. Unfortunately I packed away one of the Buffalo Router I was using as a client but I still had the other router I defined as the AP. I thought I’ll try my luck with the Baffalo Router running DD-WRT to work with the D-Link DI-524 my in-laws use (we are temporarily living with them while we sell and build the new house). It was quite easy to configure the Buffalo router to act as a client and join the D-Link router (check the tutorial to see how) but there were couple of gotcha’s.

The last time I attempted to set the wireless security on the DI-524 to WPA-PSK, my Dad’s laptop had issues keeping a stable connection. The only work around was to set it to WEP and use Mac Filter along with personal firewall on his laptop. Unfortunately, DD-WRT doesn’t support WEP with ASCII key (too soft as a security measure maybe?!?). I decided to use WPA-PSK and try again. Unfortunately, the connection issues returned on the laptops in the house. A little research showed that the D-Link router was running the original firmware and hasn’t been updated in a while. A quick visit to D-Link website and a new firmware later, all the connection issues using WPA-PSK went away (not completely, actually. My laptop with Unbutu - Edgy Eft can’t connect now and there is no built in support for WPA-PSK. Tried the hack I found on the web but didn’t work. Will have to update to Feisty Fawn later tonight as it has better support for Wireless Security). So, the lesson learned: Keep checking the hardware sites for new firmware regularly.

When I booted up OS X, it automatically detected the ethernet connection and I was online. Sound, Ethernet, action! woohoo. So my dell is running OS X with everything except the DVD Burner. Will figure that out this week; Maybe swap the DVD-ROM with DVD-RW and see if it gets recognized. If that works, I may have to get a SATA burner after all.

afternote: Downloaded some apps for OS X:

• OnyX - Free
• StuffIt Expander - Free
• VLC Media Player - Free (QT refused to play some of the DivX content I had, even after updating it with DivX codec)
• TextMate - $49.00 (for RoR - After trial expires, will try Coda - $79.00)
• Path Finder - $34.95 (much better than the Finder app any day)
• OmniWeb - $14.95 (After playing around with Safari, I was yearning for more and unfortunately, FF wasn’t as popular…)

Overall, the first impressions of OS X are good. Though a good friend of mine says that Mac OS had better support for dual monitors than Win XP, I feel that it wasn’t built with dual monitors in mind. My main pet-peeve right now is that when I have open windows in the second monitor, the File menu is still on the main monitor so I have to keep ‘mousing’ between the two. I haven’t figured out how to tile all the open windows (though expose might have better options).

After 2 weeks of struggle, finally got Mac OS X to run on my Dell XPS400. Yay!!! The funny thing is when I mentioned this to collegues and friends, the most common question that popped up was, why? Because, I can! Why does someone climb a mountain or jump from an altitude of 10000 feet with a chute they hope, works? Because they can. It’s fun.

Though I put up a debate about windows os and apple os, I sincerely do not mind exploring options. A lot of things changed when apple decided to move from PowerPC architecture to Intel x86; it was a very smart move and long due. It opened up a lot of avenues for people who were inclined to explore and it was only a short period of time before someone figured out a way to run the OS on regular PC hardware (Check out OSx86 wiki for more info). What that meant was that apple OSx is no longer tied to specific hardware. Big corporations can now work out a deal with Apple to provide pre-configured machines with OS X for a cheaper price; When more vendors jump in, it only gets better - cheaper price, better hardware. As Apple increases it’s market share, the resulting competition between MS and Apple is good for the consumer like you and me(At least that’s the rosy picture and I hope it turns out that way; only time will tell).

As for my struggle, I spent about 70 bucks. I have a Dell XPS 400 with Intel Dual Core running at 2.8ghz, 3 gig of DDR2 RAM, GeForce 7600 Dual DVI video Card supporting two Norcent 19″ Monitors - one of them Widescreen, 250 GB SATA drive with my default XP installation. I had a spare 80 GB IDE hard disk but the motherboard supported only one IDE socket which was taken up by a DVD ROM and a DVD RW. There were three spare SATA sockets and I had the option of getting a SATA to IDE adapter or a PCI-E IDE Card. I decided to go with the PCI-E IDE card in the hopes that if it doesn’t work out, I can do a RAID setup for back up. Well, I was hoping it would work.

Installation Disc:
I burnt the OS X install on a DVD-R using Nero but that turned out to be a problem (In fact, I made two copies and we tried it at a friend’s location - it just wouldn’t boot up). After digging around in forums, I figured the problem was with the burning the ISO image using Nero. The recommendation was to use DVD Decryptor or Clone DVD. I had DVD Decryptor on my XP so I burned a new Disc at 2x Speed instead of Max speed supproted by the burner for that Disc. That did it. When I booted of the disc, it worked flawlessly.

Setup:
I started the install by booting off of the DVD. As the boot process was going on, I saw something that troubled me. The Secondary PCI Channel was disabled by the Darwin Bootloader. hmm. I was pretty happy when I saw the GUI for the installation. I checked the Utilities > Disc Utility to see if the IDE Hard Drive was identified and to my dismay it wasn’t. I shut it down, removed the default SATA drive and left just the IDE drive and tried again. No dice. Back in the forums, someone posted that the hard drive has to be on the same cable as the dvd drive was. I could have done that by removing the DVD writer and hooking up the hard disc but that meant I can never close the case, thanks to how it was designed. The hard drive bays were in the bottom portion of the case and that meant I need to either get a SATA to IDE converter or a new SATA disc. After the installer failed to recognize the PCI IDE card, I didn’t have enough faith in it to recognize the drive using the adapter. Oh well.

Next day, I was searching for a deal on SATA drives and lo and behold, Circuit City happened to have a great deal on a WD 250 GB SATA drive for 60 bucks after rebate. I had some giftcards for CC plus a 10% coupon code. After work, I stopped by CC, picked up the drive and hoped, it would work. I didn’t want my XP installation to get messed up in any way, so I replaced it with the new drive.

When I booted off with the installation disc and checked in the disc utility, I was happy to find the drive listed. Since it was a brand new drive, I proceeded to format it and get it ready for the installation. I choose the Mac OS X Extended partition (instead of the Journeled - Need to find what that does) and the drive was partitioned pretty quickly. Later, I found out that this was going to be a mistake. I started the installation using default options (which was another mistake) and it started up without a hitch. After 20 minutes the installation was complete and the system rebooted. Unfortunately, after the reboot, it just wasn’t booting up. Back to the forums.

What I found was that when I partitioned the disc, I didn’t set it up as an active partition. Started the installation disc and using terminal and fdisc utility, I managed to set it up as the active partition. After reboot, I was expecting it to boot into the glorious OS X but it still didn’t. Time for dinner break.

After dinner, I dug more into the forums for any info and it looked like I wasn’t the only one who had this issue. Apparently when I selected to partitiont he disc without selecting any options, OS X created 3 different types of partitions. A 200 MB, a 50 MB(I think so, for swap space or something) and the main partition which was a problem. Someone figured out that there should be only one partition and the Disc Utility had an option to configure that. That meant, wiping the first installation and reinstalling everything. I wanted to make sure that this one would work so I checked for more details. Luckily, I found that I need to do custom install too instead of default install and select some options regarding the CPU type (Intel vs AMD). With that info, I started the whole thing again. 1 partition, custom install options (without extra printer drivers, specific install for the supported hardware and Intel CPU). 15 minutes later, voila the installation finished and it booted into OS X like a charm. Time for a little jiggy dance.

The startup requred some customization information and after providing that detail, the OS booted up. Only on one monitor, default resolution, no sound, no DVD writer, No wireless network. This is going to be a good opportunity to learn about driver installation for Mac OS X. After some research, found out about .Kext files and how to configure dual monitor support. A bit of mucking around with some .Kext files, editing some plist files and I had dual monitor support. Another little jiggy dance.

Unfortunately, that’s where my luck ended. Tried a bunch of things for Sound and Wireless network but couldn’t get it to work. I wasn’t expecting the wireless to work since it was an old piece of hardware I was using temporarily (Once we move in to our new place, I’ll have the lan setup for my office where this machine is going to be located). Played around with the OS a bit and here are some observations:

• It’s fast. Super zippy fast.
• Eye candy like I’ve never seen. Very slick interface (Vista is good but I can tell why :))
• Kinda intuitive but if you’ve been a window’s user for a while, it takes a bit of time to figure out the menu layout.
• Unix/Linux like. well, it is running BSD and thanks to Ubuntu, I am quite familiar with the file structure layout.

I played around a bit and managed to copy some music files from a USB drive (which was recognized by default). My MS wireless Keyboard and Mouse were recognized without issues too. It was too late by this time to play around but the next steps:

• get the sound working so I can start using iTunes.
• Get some sort of networking support
• Dual boot with XP.

I did take a video with my camera while the installation was going on. Will try and post it later tonite. Can’t wait to install it on a friend’s machine this weekend.

A colleague alerted me to this site about the new 7 Wonders of the world initiative. It’s aim is to documenting, maintaining, restoring and reconstructing world heritage. You can vote for the new 7 wonders of the world on their website: www.new7wonders.com. It’s a really cool idea; check out the world tour link on the top.

RMS was in St.Louis, on Monday, the 23rd to talk about GNU/Linux and Free Software Movement he started back in ‘83. A good friend of mine alerted me to the event and we both attended to listen to him. I first came to know about RMS through another friend of mine who was keen on working on the HURD project. I was fascinated to learn about the Free Software Foundation and GNU/Linux initiative specifically and was really keen on attending the event. I’ve read a lot on forums about RMS and his continuing struggle with FSF and GNU/Linux and man, did I learn some new facts that day.

The whole linux OS everyone talks is actually GNU with the Linux kernel. RMS and FSF started working on the GNU initiative back in 83 and it took them a decade to complete all the components of the OS except for the Kernel; Linux happens to be that kernel. Check out wikipedia about the history of GNU/Linux…

What was more interesting about the whole presentation was the concept of free software. There were some interesting questions about applying patents to Software (which is quite prevalent today and completely abhorred by RMS). Can an idea about an algorithm be patented? If so, why don’t we patent mathematical calculations or formulas?