Paul Shadwell RTFM

OS X 10.5 Running in VMware Fusion

Now it's easy to install Mac OS X Server 10.5 on a virtual machine using VMware Fusion, but it's not quite so easy to do the same with the normal "Desktop" version. This is because of the licensing imposed by Apple. At least they are now open to allowing OS X Server to be virtualised and this is great news for those of us who want to test those environments. However, testing generally also requires the Desktop to be virtualised also, it just makes life so much easier (and cheaper of course) to setup, install, test and break down a virtual environment than it is to do the same in hardware.

So I've been hunting around for a while for the solution. Today I found the solution on another blog.
The blog illustrates how to install OS X 10.4 (Tiger) as a virtual machine. There was a mention in the comments that this would work for Leopard so I thought I'd give it a try. I was successful! There were a couple of modifications I had to make but other than that the instructions can be followed to the letter on 10.5 as well.

Rather than plagiarise my fellow bloggers hard work I'll just give you the link. Sven G's Post

Below are my updates to Sven G's post:

2. The mounted VM HD shows up on the Desktop as Macintosh HD which is of course the same name as the normal Macintosh HD (unless you renamed it of course). If this is the case then the OS will see the mounted drive as Macintosh HD 1.
3. You will need to show hidden files and folders to navigate to the OSInstall.mpkg. I used Path Finder to do this.
6. Remember to change the Macintosh HD to the drive name that shows up in the OS. You can find this by going to terminal and typing the following:

cd /Volumes
ls -al

You will then see a list of the mounted drives.

7. Same as step 6.

You can now install the VMware Tools as normal.
I am now testing the updates to 10.5.6.

The Challenge: Blog Every Day for a Month

The great Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline set himself a goal last week of blogging every day for 30 days. I was thinking of doing something similar and as today (now yesterday) is (or was) the 1st of March, I would blog every day for the month of March.

My plan is to write something useful and/or thought provoking for each day. So my Sunday was mostly spent fighting with a Windows Vista guest virtual machine on my Mac Pro. I hadn't run it for a while and needed to do some testing for my main client. I couldn't login, it looked like although I had not set a password for the user account I was using, the account had expired and I could no longer use the VM.

I contemplated building a new VM but thought that if this has happened to me it has bound to have happened to others too. So I started to investigate how to solve the problem. I solved it and then proceeded to take snapshots of every step I took to fix it. As usual I used the internet to find the answers and as usual the information was hard to find and burried in forums. In this case the Fusion forums on VMware's website. So, to cut a long story short, it's 2:40am and I have all the screen-shots ready but now I have to go and sleep.

In my younger days I used to love writing, in my school days I did reasonably well in English but over the years it's become more and more of a chore especially when you have to do it, I'm an IT guy and writing documentation is a pet hate of mine (I know, it's common problem).

Still, hopefully, forcing myself to do this everyday will be, not just of benefit to myself, but to others too. I already have a backlog of blog entries, I'm sure a few of you are still waiting for my online accounting apps tests. I'm not great at GTD but I have to force myself and lets see if I can achieve it. It's a huge challenge and I want to succeed. OK so the first day was a "FAIL" but I hope to do better from now on. So watch this space and if you can offer any encouragement or ideas to help me overcome my laziness and manyana attitude, I would love to hear from you.

Oh! and I will blog the password reset solution, promise.

Clients for Virtual Desktops the good news and the bad news...

So the good news is that VMware View runs on a Mac via Safari. The bad news is that there will be no native client for the foreseeable future. Right now VMware are focusing on PCs and Linux. Linux? I hear you cry? I thought the same thing, surely Mac OS X is the up and coming OS that needs to be supported but it's probably a political issue since VMware and Novell are working closely together and I can well imagine Apple not wanting to talk to anyone if approached.
So it still looks like Citrix are the only player when it comes to OS X support. 

If I find out otherwise, I'll let you know.

Clients for Virtual Desktops update

So after the keynote I am happy to report that VMware will be supporting other client platforms although no specifics were mention, the name of Apple was mentioned once. So there is hope and now I will go and ask when this will be available.

What should I do now?

Do you sometimes think about where you are and what you're doing? I'm there right now. For the past few weeks I've been busy working on various projects but all for other people and not making any progress on my own projects one of which is branding myself.
I have a lot of experience in a number of different and wide ranging fields, from building virtual infrastructure environments to customising real Harley Davidsons, all of which I find a lot of fun to work on. So I'm thinking, should I focus on one or maybe two of these area or all of them together, should I have one blog that focuses on one or several blogs, one for each?
I also have some possible business opportunities and I am getting my own company off the ground, these include offering my services as a Virtual Environment Engineer and as a web designer/developer.
My daughter has just graduated as a graphic designer so I can see an opportunity also for her, she has already done some design work for me which will result in new websites soon.
So as you can see, I'm having trouble knowing where to start.
I often think about blogging my thoughts but generally that's as far as it gets and I know that's not good.
Anyway, enough of my ramblings :-)
There are a couple of things I need to complete, not least of which is the review of online accounting software. I intend to do this soon, especially as there have been significant changes to some of the software I intend to look at, plus, my tax year is coming up at the end of March, so would be handy to have something for myself by then.
If you have any input, suggestions etc, I would love to hear them.

Fusion 2.0 Released

Today saw the release of VMware's Fusion 2.0.
I have been using the beta release of 2.0 for some months now and have been enjoying a lot of the new features as mentioned in previous posts.
Now that the full release is out I can highly recommend upgrading to this new version. It's performance has been significantly improved and some of the nice usability features include recognising the operating system CD or image that you wish to install and pre-setting all the features you'll need before you start. Installing Windows, XP, Vista and Ubuntu are a breeze.
Other new features include snapshots. Snapshots are a common feature for those of us used to working with the Virtual Server technologies that VMware provides to businesses and it is now available to Fusion users.
A snapshot, as it's name suggests, takes a snapshot in time of your virtual machine. This snapshot is then available for you to revert to if you wish.
For example, say you want to test an application on a Vista VM, before installing the application, you take a snapshot of the VM, you then install the application. You can the test the application. Should you then decide to remove the app, rather than uninstalling and running the risk of residue settings being left behind you can just say, revert to snapshot and your virtual machine is exactly as it was before you started the installation.
Vmware Fusion 2.0 also allows you to create scheduled snapshots, effectively backing up the configuration at each point.

This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as 2.0 features are concerned, so go ahead and download the upgrade or, if you don't already have Fusion you can download the 30 day trial.

Let me know what you think about the new version and share your favorite features.

Hidden Pleasures of Fusion 2.0

So today I was having an issue with getting an external hard drive to be recognised on my Mac Pro.
The reason as it turns out was that the drive was not initialised and formatted and then it struck me, if I have a drive formatted on the PC as NTFS and want to read it while in OS X what do I need?

Well I hunted around and I found 2 options open to me, the first option I found was a commercail application called NTFS for Mac OS X from Paragon.
The other is an open source project now run by Google called MacFUSE.
NTFS for Mac OS X is $39.95 but you can trail it for 10 days. On the other hand MacFUSE is completely free.

This is the first time I came across MacFUSE but today I was pleasenty surprised to find that MacFUSE is actually included as part of VMware Fusion 2.0. Admittedly I am using RC1 so this may change but I hope not because this is really useful.

During the installation of VMware Fusion 2.0 RC1 you are prompted to install MacFUSE 1.5, installing MacFUSE enables you to open and read and write to VMware Fusion virtual machine disks with even needing to power up the Virtual Machne. This is of course dependnat on the fact that you either have Windows XP or Vista installed in a virtual macine.

There are lots of other cool features in Fusion 2.0 but I'l leave that for another posting.

Macs in Business

Now that I have persuaded a company to go with Apple Macs as their standard client hardware I am now thinking about how to put together the right tools for the job.

So the first machne I have to put together is a MacBook Air and I will install the following software tools:

VMware Fusion 2.0 RC1 with a Windows Vista VM and Micosoft Office 2007.
Superduper
Adium
Office 2008 for the Mac (Maybe)
X-Lite VoIP Softphone
Skype
Skitch

If you know of other applications that I should consider, I'd love to hear from you.

Have you tried Flexiscale

While in my research for hosted virtual server solutions a fellow Twitter user pointed me towards Flexiscale is a hosted virtual server provider that offers self service server provisioning and is priced by the hour.
Flexiscale Logo

Costs over a long term could be restrictive for individuals but for companies wanting to evaluate services at a minimal cost without needing to purchase new hardware this would definitely be an option worth looking into.

I purchased the minimum of £10 worth of service. I then created a Windows 2003 server with 20GB of hard disk and 512MB of RAM- Within a few minutes the server was up and running and I was able to login to it using Remote Desktop.

I then installed IIS and created a shared directory.

So far I'm impressed at just how easy this is to get going. I have been billed for my first hour at just £0.08. At this price the server will stay running for 125 hours before I need to top up the account.

I will post more on this when I have installed some more applications.