How to Zen a Intel Mac

Two of the members of the A&S ITS group here at SLU have discovered how to get a Novell ZenWorks image onto an Intel Mac. Dan Shown and Matt Goeke put their heads together and have documented the process here. This is a huge success for our group here at SLU.  We can maintain our Universal OS X image across both our PPC and Intel Macs along with being able to keep our Zen image congruent across all machines, PC or Mac, across the entire campus!

A bit of the Zoo at home

I have a friend who has a friend who knows someone who had the funniest story to share….

This family has a teenage son who suffers from Down Syndrome. One day he wanted to go to the Zoo, badly. The family agreed and they all packed up and headed to the Zoo. No sooner than they had parked the car had the son ran off into the Zoo. The family had a general idea of where he was headed and proceded to unload the car and tend to the other childern. As they headed into the Zoo their teenage son returns, dripping wet from head to toe. He is visibly shaking even with a jacket on. He tells them, “Cold! Go home now!” The parents, not wanting to spoil the day for the rest of the family, tell him that it’s ok and that there’s a change of clothes in the car. He adamantly responds,”No! Cold! Go Home!” The parents relinquish and everyone piles back into the car.
Upon arriving home the son runs into the home straight to the bathroom where he locks himself inside. The parents figure he was just warming himself up or taking a shower. After about half an hour the parents become concerned and tell the son to open the door. At that moment the parents realize the true reasons behind their son’s erratic behavior. He had smuggled a baby Penguin home from the Zoo.
Yes, that’s right. The drenched clothes, the jacket, and the exclamations of “Cold!” were all because there was a baby penguin stuffed in his jacket. The parents quickly called the Zoo, explained the story and asked what to do. The officials at teh Zoo told them to stay put, don’t call anyone we’ll be right there. Ten minutes later they arrived to retreive the baby penguin.

Now you know why there are guards posted in the Penguin House.

Zenning a Macbook Pro

So far we’ve discovered that cloning a Zen image v(ia ZenWorks imaging 7) to a Intel Mac is really easy…if you don’t want to be able to multi-boot or ever repartition the drive from within OS X. (via BootCamp)
Infact, we’ve come across another error message that doesn’t sound good:

Picture 1.png

Yeah, that’s right. Removed the Windows partition after a failed zen imaging and cannot recreate a windows partiton. Originally I had a 15GB partition for Windows, that I tried to overwrite with a zen image. When that didn’t work I deceided to delete the 15GB partition and start again, this time with a 20GB partition. That’s when I recieved the above error. If I went and dropped the partition size back to 15GB, BootCamp would run with out errors. Apparently the 5GB difference contained immovalbe files. But where?

On the onmac.net wiki there is an entry regarding triple booting. The author notes that he recieved a HAL.dll error upon rebooting. We recieved the following error when trying to restore our zen image.

Additionally, it’s of interest that in order to get the Public Beta 2 of Windows Vista running on an intel Mac you need to delete the 200mb EFI partiton.  I am puzzled as to how the computer continues to function after deleting the partition.

We’re getting closer.

Bookmark Clearinghouse

I keep my bookmarks organized in a fairly neat manner. Things that I come across that I believe are worth keeping are kept in folders with names such as Apple, Reference, Geek Tools, etc. My inbox as it were is a folder called ToDo. Which is actually a bit of a misnomer, as there’s nothing really I need to do with them…Until now! I’m gonna share them with you. Normally this sort of content is reserved for pay-sites or some sort of complicated registration process filled with free magazine offers. Not today! Here’s the list of current links I have in my ToDo folder, in no particular order.

Oblivion Tweak Guide
Mollie Sterling-Oakleaf’s Blog
Wiseacre’s Flickr
Banning Laptops in Academia?
Websitess As Graphs
Kittens Like FrontRow
MarvelDatabase
NASA-Droids on the ISS
Macworld’s review of the Macbook
Followup remarks from above Macbook article
Multi-Boot OS for Ipods
Delorean + Mac Mini
FFXII English Trailer
Photograph of Earth…From Mars
Sin:Emergence Review
Timkuktu and Skype for remote troubleshooting
k10k.net
Xyle scope, a live CSS editor
Startup key-combo’s for Intel Macs