Hackintosh part 10

When I completed the build and testing of my hackintosh I still had plans for some future updates to the hardware. 2Gb of Ram is fine for general use but gets used up fast if you start running windows in a virtual machine as well as Mail, Firefox, Graphic Converter and several other apps. I’ve now added another 2Gb of PC800 Kingston ram of the same spec as the original, and it’s working fine. System Profiler reports four banks of 1Gb PC800 ram and no problems. I can now allocate 1Gb of Ram to a virtual machine without slowing down the rest of the system.

VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1

A while back I compared the three biggest Virtualisation products for the Mac. Parallels, VMware Fusion and VirtualBox are all impressive products that performed equally, and I used the free Virtualbox for my occasional Windows needs. Parallels was part of the recent MacUpdate bundle which I bought, so I’ve been using that most recently. It’s been running well and seems more responsive than the previous versions I tried.

The reason for this recap is that VMware Fusion 2 beta 1 has been released, and adds some interesting new features. Multi display support will please some users, even if support for eight monitors is very niche. Importing Parallels and Virtual PC machines is a useful if late addition. DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 2 is perhaps the most interesting, and I’m wondering how well this will work on my hackintosh. Perhaps the biggest improvement is that version 2 allows any printer attached to your Mac to be used direct from Windows without installing drivers.

Also new is an updated version 1.6 of Virtualbox. It’s now out of beta, although there are a few things still not supported:

Currently, we are aware of the following restrictions:
•    No support for Host Interface Networking
•    No support for Internal Networking
•    No support for audio input
•    No support for VT-x/AMD-V (rarely required)
•    No support for raw disk access
•    The numlock emulation isn’t implemented yet
•    The VirtualBox kernel extension is currently accessible from all user accounts
Note that we are planning to address all known issues.

Things are certainly moving on in the Mac virtualisation market, so I’ll be trying all three products again this week with some updated results to follow.

Are Psystar for real?

The debate on Psystar and their ‘Opencomputer’ platform of pre built hackintosh’s continues. A couple of days ago Cnet published a review after they managed to get their hands on one of the mythical machines. Today there’s another article discussing the legal implications of what Psystar are doing, and the struggle ahead of them if Apple decides to take legal action. Good luck in that fight, I would say starting a legal battle with a company that has 19.4 Billion Dollars in cash is suicidal. I’m almost hoping Apple do decide to take action if only to see how the EULA hold up. Companies have been restricting our use of the items we buy for some time now, so maybe it’s about time someone challenged that.

Reviewers are gradually coming around to the idea that Psystar may be legitimate, though I would still wait to hear of a reasonable number of computers shipped before buying one. I’m sitting on the fence here, as the OS X updates page at Psystar is still empty. Lets see what happens when the imminent 10.5.3 is released.

Hackintosh disaster recovery part 2

In part one I looked at the steps I took to get my hackintosh working again after accidentally overwriting the boot information. The computer has been working fine for over three weeks since, and I haven’t found any side effects with software or hardware. My latest efforts have been focused on making bootable backups for use in the event of an unbootable hackintosh.

Macs are easy?

Apple products have had a reputation for ease of use for a long time, but I’m starting to think this has gone seriously awry with Leopard. Up to the release of 10.5 I didn’t have a problem operating Macs on a mixed Mac and Windows network. Leopard brought the promise of automatic discovery and display of network shares in the Finder sidebar. I think I mentioned this before, but it worked for half an hour then disappeared. I’ve spent several hours yesterday and today trying to figure out what is going wrong with this, and got to the point where my Macbook and Hackintosh were both visible to each other. The Macbook could connect to the Hackintosh shares, but not the other way round. Add to this the problems I had when upgrading my Macbook to 10.5.2 where the wireless access points became unconnectable and there’s some serious networking issues with Leopard. Does anyone have a fix for this?

Macintosh anti-virus software part 2

Last time I looked at three of the commercial anti-virus packages available for the Macintosh, from Symantic, Sophos and Mcafee. Of the three only Symantic’s Norton anti-virus for Mac was aimed at home users, and Sophos was anything but straightforward for a home user to buy. So what else is available?

Macintosh anti-virus software part 1

While currently something of an oxymoron, there’s a genuine case for running anti-virus software on your Mac. There’s not much in the way of genuine threats to the Mac OS in terms if virii but it doesn’t hurt to ensure you don’t pass anything nasty on to more vulnerable operating systems. Add in the very real possibility that a Mac OS threat will surface as the platform gains popularity and the need for Mac anti-virus becomes more compelling. We could all feel safe as Mac user’s but a smug attitude never gets much sympathy when it all goes horribly wrong.

Macworld Expo 2008 roundup

The annual Macworld Expo in San Francisco has now finished, and several sites have their reviews of events.

• Macworld - Best of Show awards page, Expo Podcast
• MacRumors - Winners and Losers roundup
• AppleInsider - Four-page photo gallery
• ars technica - Day one, Day two, Day three roundups
• MacsimumNews - Macworld Awards

Lots of interesting opinions on the announcements, and some very conflicting views. The charge for iPod apps seems to have split users straight down the middle, and the Macbook Air coverage seems to be split between ‘another G4 cube’, ‘nice as a second computer but limited as a first machine’ and ‘I want it now’. The last seems to be limited to geeks and macheads so it may not spread to normal people.