Once I got OS X booting on my Dell desktop, I thought I’d give it a try on the laptop, a Dell Latitude D600.  I read that OS X would indeed install on the D600, since it does have SSE2 - it’s a Pentium M - using one of the OS X images floating around.  I won’t detail the whole process as others have done that.  The main down side it that the ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 is not supported - or at least not supported well, so I don’t have any hardware acceleration, but I did get it running at native resolution of 1400 x 1050.  It works pretty well - speed it comparable to XP and Ubuntu which I also have installed on the laptop.  Wireless networking worked out of the box as did sound.  The wired network connection required a kext (kernel extension) patch to get working.  All in all, not to difficult.  Why do this you ask?  1) I like OS X, 2) I can’t afford a new Mac right now and 3) It’s a cool, geeky thing to do.

No, software update doesn’t work for the system patches, but I can live without that for now.

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I’ve been using an Enermax Crystal aluminum keyboard for like a year now and love it.  Since I’ll be working from home more once the baby’s born, I’m trying to get my home office as productive (or more) than my work office - that means getting my computer up to snuff.  I’ve always liked the feel of laptop (aka scissor-switch) keyboards and the Crystal keyboard has one for desktop use.  The new Enermax keyboards - apparently they don’t make the Crystal any more and it was a bit pricey - have the “L” shaped enter key which I detest, so that was out of the question for a new keyboard for home.  Luckily I found the Kensington SlimType keyboard while making a pit stop at MicroCenter the other day.  For $30 this keyboard rocks!  It’s got a really nice feel and the layout is the same as the Crystal.  Once again, I’m a happy camper.

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I created my “hackintosh” a few weeks ago on my Dell Dimension 9200.  The main reason was so I could check out TextMate - the editor most Rails guys seem to use.  I’ve been using NetBeans on Ubuntu for a while now and like it, but just wanted to give TextMate a whirl.  Well, after using OS X, I’m really starting to dig it.  Not sure if I like it as much as Ubuntu, but it’s better than Windows.  Some things take getting use it - like the close/minimize/maximize buttons on the left side instead of the right.  Also the application menu always betting at the top of the screen is strange, although in some ways nice. Oh, and TextMate is great.

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Not exactly sure what caused it, but my server crashed last night around 6:15pm.

Logs just have:

Mar 5 18:13:50 [kernel] eth0: PCI Bus error 8290.
Mar 5 18:13:51 [kernel] eth1: Tx timeout - resetting


We’ve been cleaning up the server room and making some changes. One of the guys moved my box a bit and might have jiggled things just enough to cause this.

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The new Intel based Macs look so sweet. Not sure if I could decide between a 20″ iMac or a MacBook Pro. Both would be nice…

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This isn’t a new thing, but just thought it’d be cool to try out. The developer version of OS X Tiger for Intel got leaked (of course!) and so the geeks wanted to run OS X on thier PCs now, and so they did!

When I heard you could do it in VMWare, I figured I didn’t have anything to lose!

This is running in VMWare 5 on my Dell Inspiron 9100. I gave 512M of the 1GB RAM to OS X. It’s still slow and seems that networking in VMWare isn’t working yet.

To speed up things I found this post: “Want to speed up the performace under vmware? 1) Use ‘Linux, Other Linux’ as the Guest OS type, not Other or FreeBSD. 2) From inside the VM’s BIOS, disable the floppy controller and the two serial ports.” That did help speed up the system.

Can’t do too much as a serious system, but cool to play around with!

If you want more info check out the OSx86 Project.

Oh, and if you happen to get “tiger-x86.tar.bz2″, be sure to use a good decompressor. At first I couldn’t get the 6GB tiger-x86-flat.img file to expand past 2GB - IZArc didn’t give any errors, just only 2GB file. I tried WinRAR 3.5 and that did the trick!

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We have an old Dell Precision 610 workstation that I’m working on setting up as our Asterisk VoiceMail/VoIP box and ran into a snag with Fedora Core 4.

The Fire GL 1000 Pro is detected (correctly) as a 3DLabs Permedia 2 chip, but the DCC probe is screwed up, so I couldn’t set it to more that 800×600 with 256 colors - that blows!

After some Googling, I found that running this command:

system-config-display --set-videoram=8192 --forceui

that lets you tell X that your card has 8MB ram and then I had lots of options. Works great!

References at RedHat’s Bugzilla: Entry 1, Entry 2

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Sweet! Jen just got me an iPod shuffle! I won’t go on about how small it is, etc., since it’s been out a while, but it’s really cool! I really wanted something to put podcasts and some music on - burning a mp3 cd doesn’t cost a lot, but it’s a pain. (My car stereo plays mp3 cds.) Anyway… that’s all for now, but I hope to post more soon!

UPDATE: I better add that Jen gave it to me for our 2 year dating anniversary which was on the 17th! Woo-hoo for that too! 2 years - how can she put up with me!

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Jen got her Mac mini on Saturday! The Apple store guys called Friday night and she was so excited! Since everyone seems to be posting pics of the unpacking and setting up of their Mac mini’s, I thought Jen would like to as well. (Did I ever mention that Jen’s nickname is “Mach”, pronounced “Mac” - fitting, eh?)

The only issue we had was the little PS2/USB keyboard/mouse adapter the Microcenter guy sold us - didn’t work with the keyboard. (This is the second time in a row that a Microcenter guy gave me bad info - I know more than these guys anyway so why do I listen to them at all?) A trip to Circuit City and $25 later, Jen had a good working USB keyboard and mouse cable.

I’ll post more as Jen explores the world of the Mac and moving from Windows to OS X. (And continues her love of Steve Jobs!) If money permits, I might have to get one of these things too! Especially since I found out that opening the thing doesn’t void the warranty, well unless you break it, of course!

Oh yeah, Jen’s hasn’t let me touch the thing at all yet, so I can’t comment on it, except that it’s tiny and very cool.

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My old buddy Henry has been touting rsync for a long time now, but only recently have I got around to setting it up - and now I must say it rocks!

I’m using it to backup the main stuff - configs, code, content, etc. - from our other servers to our main server, which has a hefty amount of RAID5 storage.

After a few tweaks here and there and a couple of cron jobs later, we’ve got a nice simple backup system up and running without a lot of the headaches of tape or the cost of commercial packages. It was even pretty painless to setup rsync on our Win2K database boxes to rsync the MS-SQL data dumps. (If you didn’t know, rsync is standard on most Linux distros.)

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