Category: Technology

How to Zen an Intel Mac Part III

See previous endeavors

Zen and Intel Mac Part I
How to Zen an Intel Mac Part II
How to Zen a Parallels VM

This week we’ve discovered some additional noes about getting a Zen image onto (into?) a Boot Camp partition. The process is well documented but is rather time consuming. The 3 biggest parts are 1) swapping out the ACPI HAL from our base with a multi-core ACPI. 2) The boot.ini pointing to the 3rd partition on the Mac HD 3) Using the sync tool in rEFIt to sync the mbr after imaging.

Hopefully in the near future I’ll be able to test if pulling down an image directly is possible. (img rp $PROXYADDR //$PROXYADDR/baseimg.zmg a1:p3 + an add-on image with Multiprocessor ACPI is a hint)

Here’s a basic rundown:

From Start to Finish

1) Prepare the Intel Mac
a) Bootcamp, NetRestore, rEFIt

2) Prepare the add-on images:
a) Create an add-on image for XP drivers, correct boot.ini (partition 3) and correct muli-core ACPI

3) Prepare the Windows Disk Image
a) Install the Zen base and add-on images using the ZenWorks Imaging tools. Shutdown and boot into Target mode
b) Create an NTFS master disk image (base.ntfs) using NetRestore Helper

4) Restore the NTFS disk image to the Bootcamp partition

Future Deployment

Once you have a base NetRestore image, you can simply follow the following directions.

1. Install Bootcamp on the Mac meant for deployment.
2. Partition the HD as you like.
3. Restart into OSX and restore your base NetRestore image to the Boot Camp partition.
4. Install rEFIt and restart
5. Resync the MBR if needed and boot into Windows
6. Let sysprep run.

Additional Notes

You can’t use a Macbook as the main imaging machine. The keyboard does not work with the Zen imaging CD. Nor does an external keyboard. This limits you to an intel iMac, Mac Mini, or Mac Pro.

Once the XP drivers have been installed you can press the following key command for Ctrl+Alt+Delete.

Fn+ctrl+option (alt)+command (Apple)+delete

To right click, after the XP drivers are installed press the following key command:

Right command (Apple)+Trackpad button

RSS OMG WTFBBQ!!!!!!111

I’ve been an avid user of Ranchero NewsGator’s NetNewsWire RSS (Lite) reader. It’s a great app and it has a huge user base. However, as of this evening that has all changed. I’ve found a kick butt replacement that’s a million times better. It’s called Vienna.

vienna

Vienna is an open source aggregator that has some cool features.

First, it allows me to archive feeds. This was one of the features lacking in NNW Lite. Feeds would fall off into the void way too quickly. Now I can horde my information FOREVER.

Second, I like the UI more so than NNW. It looks like an iApp. NNW looked very ancient, in a 10.2 vs 10.4 Finder kinda way.

Smart Folders. Holy Cow. I can now create folders with keywords like “silly string” and “brown toed shoes” and any articles that contain those phrases will instantly appear in my silly string and brown toed shoes folder*
Pretty sweet deal.

If you’re a Mac user and you’re looking for a robust and well put together RSS reader, look no further than Vienna. It’s open source (ergo free), has a great feature set, well thought out UI and is capable of importing your subscriptions from NNW. Highly recommended!

*I had to think of something I’d want to filter. Silly string and brown toed shoes were the first things to come to my mind. Kids, don’t blog late.

A Very Hungry iTunes

I’m totally digging the new iTunes 7. Every release I geek out of ther changes Apple makes. I haven’t had a single bad experience upgrading to the next version. They just keep making the dang thing better. I like the new Coverflow interface, the super cool album art finder and the greatly improved iPod settings ‘panel’. But there are two things I’d like to mention that detract from such a robust program; the new UI elements, their darker than normal look and the huge memory usage. I’ve found fixes for the UI but have no fix for the memory usage. 🙁
Black is the new Aqua

I don’t care for the BIG BOLD LETTERS used for the header in the Source list. It’s rather distracting. Another issue with the source list is the amount of wasted space between the different groups. But hey! It looks like someone felt the same and posted this hint on macosxhints.com. No more BIG BOLD LETTERS!

What is up with the dark and dreary black and grey UI elements? Where’s the pretty aqua blue? Oh, ok so this is a ‘new’ version of iTunes, we get it. Yeah…So, Paul Barlow to the rescue with his great little Aqua4iTunes app. It replaces that dreary black and grey with nice shiny aqua buttons! Check out his great little beta here.

So far I’ve found fixes for the big things that bother me. Now let’s talk about something I can’t fix. The amount of memory iTunes uses when invoking the Coverflow view.
Feed me Seymour!

Below is a screenshot of iTunes at idle. At this point all I’ve done is open itunes and let it sit for a moment. I’m not playing a song, downloading anything, or updating my iPod. Just idle.

iTunes on wo coverflow

iTunes is using a very comfortable 34MB of ram, no biggie. Now lets turn on Coverflow.

coverflow on

I flipped through my albums for a few seconds and the memory usage increased to 563MB of ram. That’s 1/3 of my total memory dedicated to one single applicaion. Wow. I have a modest library, with about 8GB of music. Ok, so let’s turn off Coverflow and reclaim that memory…

coverflow off

Uhhh..Ok iTunes where’s the rest of that ram? 329 MB is still being used? How do I get that back? What if I close Coverflow, wanting to free up some resources to open another program? I have to close iTunes and reopen it. Groan.

These are minor compared to the other problems I’ve been hearing about. So I’ll chalk this up to a new version glitch/bug/rushtogetitoutthedoor problem. Here’s to hoping this memory monster will one day be tamed. I’ll just be glad I’m not running this on a G4 iMac with 245 MB of ram! Ouch.

How to Zen an Intel Mac Part II

This is a rough draft, I just wanted to get something up ASAP. More details to come.

UPDATE: See the post How to Zen an Intel Mac Part III


All credit goes to Jeff Abernathy, Ameer Abdelmalek, Corey Webb and Queanna Jones. I just sat around and watched HD Movie Trailers in a Parallels Virtual Machine. 😉

To make things quicker you will need more than one Mac.
One to image with windows from your Zen imaging CD
One to serve the image you just created
One which will be your target Mac you want to have the dual boot set up on.
Once you Create your Windows image you can reuse that on multiple dual boot macs.

Creating the Windows image
1) Stick your Zen imaging cd in your mac and install the zen image, just like you would on a PC. This will wipe everything and make your shiny mac a Windows only machine. With our setup the Windows partion is on partion(1). This is bad. EFI/GUID wants Windows to be on the 3rd partition. This is why just installing windows from an intall cd works while just imaging that zen partition from the imaging cd does not.
2) Once imaged, don’t restart it!
3) Boot into Target Disk mode
4) Use NetRestore Helper to create a master disk image of the drive. I would save this as something informative like zenbase.ntfs

Create the OS X image
1) If you have a base image you use to deploy over multiple machines, image the target mac with your image.
2)Install and Run Bootcamp to create your partitions

Install the Windows image
3)Use NetRestore Helper to restore the zenbase.ntfs image to the newly created windows partion.

Fix the boot.ini
1)boot off of XP SP2 disk and run bootconfig /restore

a good boot.ini will look like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

See that partition(3) part? That’s the kicker.

If you fix the boot.ini before creating the .ntfs file, then you only have to do it once, instead of at every deployment. This could be done with a WinPE CD or by bringing down an add-on image with the right boot.ini in it. Unfortunately, Linux mounts the NTFS partition read-only, so editing it at the command line is not an option. – Corey Webb

Apple.com

I’ve posted the PeopleFinder widget that Jeff and I made up on Apple’s website.

onapple.png

Jeff added a lot of cool functionality and code optimization to make it a really slick little ldap widget. Perhaps version 5.0 will have even more neat stuff!

You can download it here.