Intuition & Elbow Grease

I’ve been using VMWare’s Fusion product on my 1st gen Apple Macbook (2.0Ghz, 2GB ram, 160GB hard drive upgrade) sporadically now for about six months. I originally purchased the 1.0 version and was pleased when just a few weeks ago I found out that there was a free upgrade to 1.1 which included a few bug fixes. The original install and subsequent upgrade were as smooth and uneventful as one tends to expect from Mac software versions. Insert the installation cd, drag the icon to your Applications folder and you’re done. After that, you’re ready to run Fusion for the first time. Of course, you will need to configure or install your first virtual machine the first time you run it. And wouldn’t you know it, there are hundreds of ready-made virtual machines for you to download at VMWare’s appliance marketplace.

Perhaps a brief explanation of virtualization (of the software variety) might be in order here. Normally your operating system (be it OSX, a Linux-variant, or WindowsXP) runs on top of the hardware platform that you’ve chosen. The operating system needs to have various drivers that allow it to connect to and control the myriad little pieces of the system. From network connections to video cards, they all need corresponding software for the operating system to be able to utilize them. So imagine that you have a program that runs on top of your operating system that intercepts and mimics all of the system calls and abstracts and isolates them from the real hardware you are running on. This software creates a separate ‘virtual’ computer on top of your existing system. You can then install a new operating system along with various programs into this ‘virtual’ computer and you then have a computer system running inside of (or on top of, depending on your viewpoint) your original system.

But that’s silly you say. Why in the world would I want to run two operating systems, one inside the other? Surely that can’t be very efficient! Actually there are several benefits to running a virtual system. First and foremost is the ability to create distinctly separate environments in which to work. For example: My primary laptop is as I’ve mentioned previously a wonderful little Apple Macbook running the latest OSX Leopard operating system. There are times when it would be beneficial to have access to various WindowsXP programs, such as Internet Explorer when I am trying to work out some cross-browser html/css hack. Or I need access to certain security tools that are only available for Windows (read: Cain & Abel ~ caution: this site is not safe for work environments) or perhaps I’m working on a particular Solaris 10 issue. Wouldn’t it be handy if I could just fire up the operating system of my choice from within my macbook?

And that’s exactly what I do with VMWare Fusion! Not only do I have two full WindowsXP installs, I also have the latest Ubuntu Stable version (7.10 as of this writing) and a full version of OpenSolaris 10 (Indiana) all available to me with just a click!

Another advantage comes from the ability to consolidate server hardware.  Suppose that you have a web server that is used primarily during business hours and a secure ftp server that has its peak activity during the middle of the night.  Instead of maintaining two separate servers, you could consolidate them onto a single server by migrating them into a VMWare instance running on a single server.   With some of VMWare’s other tools you could even load balance both the web server and the ftp server across multiple machines.

So you get the ability to access multiple operating systems from a single desktop, giving you the ability to create an on-the-fly virtual lab.  From a server perspective you can consolidate hardware resources (reducing power, heat and physical space consumption) or leverage your existing hardware better by taking advantage of VMWare’s Virtual Infrastructure.

One particularly useful benefit of VMWare’s Fusion product is its ‘Unity’ feature that allows you to run applications from a virtual machine along side your mac software.  Instead of a single window dedicated to your virtual machine and all of the programs that run inside of it, you get a drop down menu that allows you to run the individual applications in their own window!  Pretty slick and a fun trick to show your co-workers that you can run the latest Internet Explorer on your Mac (useful for testing those browser html/css hacks mentioned earlier!)

See some initial Fusion screenshots after the cut.

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Gentoo Prefix Bootstrap Process for Mac OS X has a lengthy walkthrough on getting Gentoo’s emerge package management system installed onto a Mac OSX system.  Naturally I had to give it a shot!  I’ve never worked with Gentoo before so I really had no idea what to expect from emerge.

From a few conversations with a collegue I learned that I could very easily tailor the build process to my specific environment by customizing the make.conf file for emerge.  Unlike some package management systems that either grab a generic binary for your platform, emerge will pull down the latest source code and compile it directly for your specific machine.  If I recall correctly, the FreeBSD ports collection also works this way, as does Debian’s apt (although I’m not sure of the ability to modify machine-specific compile time flags with either system)

The install detailed in the walkthrough (see link above) is a bit sparse on background information such as why call emerge with the oneshot option. (still not sure about that myself, from the emerge man page: “Emerge as normal, but do not add the packages to the world profile for later updating”)  Each of the build steps took a rather long time on the aging Mac G4 box and I unfortunately kept running into compile errors about 3/4ths of the way through the process.  The process failed trying to compile Autom4te (an M4 replacement for autoconf) due to various reasons (one of which might be a missing perl library)

After stepping through the various stages of the install a couple of times and only getting marginal success, I decided the easiest route would be to script the install process so that I could re-run it at my leisure.  I just grabbed the commands listed in the walkthrough and stuck them in a shell script (no error-checking or anything fancy) which would allow me to set a couple of variables and then re-run the script as often as needed.   The script (and the author’s walkthrough) relies on another script called ‘bootstrap-prefix.sh’ (also available from the walkthrough site) so I created a directory called ‘emerge’ and therein placed both the ‘bootstrap-prefix.sh’ script and my own ’setup_gentoo_bootstrap_env.sh’ script.

I set my ‘EPREFIX’ variable to /usr/local/gentoo, so everytime the process would fail, I could just ‘rm -rf /usr/local/gentoo’ and start over.   Since part of the process includes pulling down all the latest sources I figured that if I just waited a week, maybe someone would have found the issue and fixed it.  But alas, as of this morning the process still fails in the same spot.  So I’ll send a note to the maintainer and see what happens.  Until that time I have to conclude that emerge on OSX constitutes the ‘epic-fail’ tag.

After all of this, I finally just grabbed the latest macports and within minutes I installed several standard software packages.  Both macports and fink provide very easy access for OSX to most readily available linux software.  However it does appear at the moment that macports has been getting more attention and is more supported (at least by comparing the verbage on each of their websites) and even though I’ve been a big fan of fink in the past, I went with macports if for no better reason other than its the one that I haven’t utilized before.

Code for setup_gentoo_bootstrap_env.sh located after the cut.

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It’s probably no secret that I’ve turned into a huge mac fanatic… The recent acquisition of a mac mini puts the household total to four machines actively in use. It also means that my low-end machine, a Power Mac G4 PCI (Yikes!) is just sitting there, looking all forlorn and wanting to be put back into service.

It occurred to me that the old box could serve quite nicely as a replacement for my aging content/proxy server. Currently I’m running Dan’s Guardian and Squid on top of Ubuntu Linux on an old Compaq PentiumII. While it does work rather well, the hard drive has suffered a couple of soft failures in the last few weeks (fixable, but annoying) so the thought occurred to me that I could swap out the old box for the G4, utilizing the BSD underpinnings of OSX to run the proxy and content software.

As I began to think about it, I imagined that I could also throw in a nice second ethernet card and then use the IPFW firewall software (that is already installed by default) to act as my primary firewall. The addition of an ethernet nic and I could also use the box as a wifi hotspot (complete w/captive portal via nocatauth) and provide a robust wifi connection to the entire house. Of course, being somewhat security minded ::grin:: I am an advocate of using WPA2 to assist in securing the wireless connection.

So I set out by installing OSX Tiger 10.4.11 (the latest version that is supported on the G4 PCI ) along with the requisite hardware. Squid and Dan’s Guardian installed quickly and effortlessly (although I’m still trying to understand the whole ‘OSX init script’ landscape to get the services to start at boot time) and went to configure the wifi nic as a hotspot. In ‘System Preferences’ is a choice labeled ‘Sharing’ that allows you to set up internet sharing and choose the interfaces. You can then set the options for your wifi connections via the ‘AirPort Options…’ button. Lo and behold, clicking on it allows you to set up WEP (a very poor security option as it can be cracked almost effortlessly nowadays) and no choice for either WPA or the more robust WPA2!

This is really a show-stopper for me at the moment. I’ll still continue to plod along and replace the proxy/content server with this G4, but how dissappointing that Apple won’t provide reasonable security for sharing out the AirPort connection, but I guess the ‘Steve’ wants me to shell out even more money for an Airport Extreme (which just isn’t going to happen since I’m saving up for the next gen iPhone!)

(cross-posted to Palm Addicts Forum)

A note for Mac users:

I thought I’d add a note about achieving a synchronized directory of text files without using Missing Sync. It does require a wee bit of unix knowledge (since the technique relies on running a shell script from the terminal) but not too much!

In order to make this work, your palm device needs to be able to connect as an external drive. Some devices such as the Lifedrive come with a program called DriveMode that provides this functionality. For the rest of us there is the wonderful Card Export II by Softick With your palm device connected to your macintosh, activate the Card Export program and you will see a new drive show up on your desktop! You can now browse the sd expansion card in your palm device directly from your macintosh desktop! Very cool, eh?

So what about synchronizing directories? Let’s suppose that in your home directory (usually /Users/username, where username is the name that shows up when you open Terminal from the Utilities directory) you’ve created a subdirectory called “Textfiles” Within that subdirectory you could have a bunch of text documents or subdirectories containing other text documents. Utilizing subdirectories is a nice way to keep your files sorted by project, subject or however else you like. Now comes the unix magic: in order to synchronize this “Textfiles” directory with your palm’s SD card, open up a terminal and run the following command:

rsync -av –delete /Users/username/Textfiles /Volumes/SD_CARD/PALM/

(remember to replace ‘username’ with your macintosh username)

This command will synchronize the “Textfiles” directory with the “/PALM/Textfiles” directory on your palm’s SD card. Now you can use a text editing program on your palm such as txtMemo to view or modify your files wherever you happen to be!

This is the way I used to synchronize my text files before purchasing Missing Sync. It requires a few extra steps each time you sync your palm device, but it works quite well. However, Missing Sync can do all of this plus a whole lot more! If you are a heavy palm user on a macintosh, you really should look into purchasing Missing Sync! It has simplified my data sync to the point where I don’t even think twice about it anymore!

I guess I just don’t understand the appeal. Yeah, it’s made by Apple… and it’s umm white. And way overpriced. (oh, did I just say that out loud?) I recently went throught the process of purchasing a portable mp3 player for myself and was astonished at the number of people flocking to the iPod.

I realize that I come very late to this whole portable media player thing, but it comes down to a realization of what I want vs. what I need. Obviously no one really needs an mp3 player. It’s all about want. Now, I’ve been a big fan of Apple ever since OS X came out. You see, I’m one of those aging unix sysadmins that you hear about occassionally or see in an old Dilbert strip. Why is that important, well it gives you an idea of my perspective on technology. I have a preference for “Things That Work” vs. “Things That Are Pretty”. (read “Unix” vs. “Microsoft”) OSX combines these things so its a win-win scenario.

So when I began my quest for an mp3 player my first inclination was to head right to my local Apple Store and pluck down a reasonable amount for my new toy. Now I didn’t just run right out and buy one. I did manage to do a bit of research on price and features. I’m not going to list all of that here, its readily available from roughly a billion other sites that do “reviews” What I did quickly realize was that my needs (yes, I am aware that they are my needs and not necessarily yours) were quite simple. I have no need for some egregious amount of portable media. I do not require that my entire day be choreographed to its own soundtrack. Besides, I usually have access to some sort of radio, cd or mp3 player when I’m in front of my computer or driving down the highway. So a portable player for me needs to fill a very narrow desire to have access to media while I work out. I walk for about an hour each morning (not every morning, in fact I’ve taken the last week off due to umm… the heat! yeah, its those triple digits in the midwest that have kept my lazy butt indoors!) and enjoy being able to listen to some decent tunage or an audio book or two.

So my requirements were simple: I needed an hour or two worth of storage space, it had to be easily portable (read not a small brick strapped to my waist) Expandability would be quite nice and a radio tuner would just be spiffy. I found that the local Wally World was dicontinuing a bunch of the older players in favor of the newer models. For a paltry sixty five bucks, I picked up a Rio Chiba with 256 meg of flash memory, sd card expansion and a radio tuner. I’ve had the unit for about two months now and I can say that it’s a great fit for my needs. It’s light weight, has enough memory (and then some) to carry enough music to get me around my walk (twice) and has been hassle-free!

I could’ve bought a nifty iPod and been able to read RSS feeds on it, but if I really want a portable reading machine, my *discontinued* Sony Clie works great! I am waiting for the next generation iPod that will hopefully feature a larger screen, built-in 802.11G, handwriting recognition, full PIM functions and an external keyboard. (you already see where this is going if you know me at all…) Yeah, that’s right, I’ll buy it when it’s an iNewton! But for simple mp3 playback, please! I don’t need 60 hours worth of music at my beck and call every minute of the day. I have other devices for text and organization that quite frankly, do a better job.

Apple, I love you. But you’re just no good for me right now. I hope you understand.

Woah, momma! After the announcement on Monday regarding Apple’s switch to Intel (which we microcasted about over at CrazyAces) comes a very illuminating article by Robert Cringely regarding the real reason for the announcement. Cringely speculates that Intel is poised to buy Apple, and he makes some truly insightful observations. Now, I’m not exactly well-versed in the dealings of multi-billion dollar companies, but besides all the “business-related” reasons that he mentions for the acquisition the one thing that really sticks out and makes me think there’s more than a bit of truth to this speculation is Cringely’s last point: Steve Jobs would finally be able to beat Bill Gates. That alone, I think, is enough of an incentive for this to become reality. (And I think it provides a clean escape for Jobs to go back to playing over at Pixar)

So to some it up:

Apple + Intel = iApple

And remember, you read it here second! (or maybe third… whatever)