Venu Anuganti Blog

Yesterday I brought 2GB Lexar JumpDrive® 360 from Frys, Sunnyvale which offers Windows Vista ReadyBoost to increase the system memory, so that it can boost the performance by acting as the cache.

When I inserted this flash drive on to my Dell Precision Work Stattion 490 running Windows Vista ultimate, it asked if it can test the flash drive to speed up the system. As the drive meets the requirements, and Vista asked me how much memory I can use from the flash drive, and I alloted 1.8GB, which is the default size suggested by Vista. And I can see that the system runs fast when loading frequently used applications such as Internet Explorer. But did not had time to test it how much extra benifit am getting. As you need to keep the drive for couple of days so that it can have enough stuff in cache to offer what we needed.

On the other hand, as the main purpose to buy this flash drive is to speed by my Vista in Parallels on my macbook pro, when I inserted the same flash drive to mac, immediately it told that the drive does not meet the requirements. Its funny. The Parallels version 3188 does support USB 2.0, not sure if Parallels allows the speed of USB that vista is asking (another big mess with USBs when using in Parallels, some times you need to reboot the mac to get the things work as you expect, hopefully future versions will address better USB support in Mac & Parallels). Once Parallels or Mac allows the USB read/write speed that Vista is demanding, this is a real cool way to boost virtual Vista. Once this works, then one does not really need Boot Camp.

Yesterday night when I went to sleep, I had Windows Vista running in the parallels 3188 on Mac in full-screen mode. I was editing some documents, and left the OS running in full-screen mode as is…but when I woke up in the morning after 6-8 hours… I could not able to get the control to OS back. Parallels grayed the OS, and nothing is working. I tried to change it to window mode, coherence mode and to full-screen mode no use.

Looks like there is a bug in Parallels where in if the guest OS goes to sleep (I had windows to goto sleep in 1 hour) and Parallels does not have any control over the OS. Anyway, upon clicking stop and rebooting back..everything started working. I noticed that stop and start back resulted a reboot.

As a newbie to Mac, I expected much more advanced keyboard layout and shortcuts for Mac like Windows had. For example, when you are using any recent Windows OS, one doesn’t really need mouse to do most of the work.

But on the reverse side, Mac offers very poor keyboard layout on MacBook Pro along with it does not provide a way to bind any global shortcuts to launch direct applications…thats kind of annoy, unless you know how to script. But you can not expect everybody to know how to script. But the bare OS needs mouse initially to get started.

After searching and from people recommendations, I tried Spark - 3.0b2, and I found it as my life saver, so it makes it easy to setup shortcuts for any applications or binaries, at least it solved some of my major issues. But I still could not find a way to launch non-binary applications using global key shortcuts, for example, to launch applications or my home folder or utilities without going to Finder and using that shortcuts.

Anyway, I hope Mac will address this issue in coming version of OS with a nice key binding so that it will be more user friendly. These are the shortcuts I found it useful for everyday life (especially for people using PC and Mac):

• Command : Command key is also the Apple key
• Option : Option key is also the alt key
  

• Command-left : Move to the beginning of the line
• Command-Right : Move to the end of the line
• Command-Up : Go to beginning of the page or document
• Command-Down : Go to end of the page or document
• Option-Left : go backward to the beginning of the word
• Option-Right : go forward to the end of the word
• Option-Up : go to the beginning of previous paragraph
• Shift-Command-Left: Select text to the beginning of the line from current cursor
• Shift-Command-Right: Select text to the end of the line from current cursor
• Option-Delete : Delete to the beginning of the word
• Fn-Option-Delete : Delete to the end of the word
• Shift-Command-Left: Select text to the beginning of the line from current cursor
• Shift-Command-Right: Select text to the end of the line from current cursor
• Option-Down : go to the end of next paragraph
• Command-X : Cut the current selected text
• Command-C : Copy current selected text
• Command-P : Paste the text from the clipboard
• Delete : Similar to backspace in Windows
• Fn-Delete : Actual Delete

As I broke my Mac OS X, and thought of reinstalling everything from scratch as I am not sure update will fix the user issue as it was not allowing to install any applications.

This also allowed me to partition my disk to two partitions so that I can use one partition for mac and other partition for backup and parallels related images. The installation is one of the slowest that I ever saw in my whole life…it took more than 2 hrs to complete….not sure whats wrong with Apple …because Windows XP or Vista hardly takes 35-45 minutes…When I use Boot Camp to install Vista, it just completes within 30 minutes.

Once it rebooted to OS, it was back to normal..and I copied all my applications back and it seemed to be working. I could not find a way to export KeyChain Access entries…and overwriting the folder back from old one, did not help…atleast the parallels and other things started working after copying the hdd files.

Ok, another newbie experiment on my new MBP (MacBook Pro) led to break my user account; which afterwards did not allow me to install anything. It should have been nicely accepted what I did, but you never knew the corners of operating system which are not tested..

As I had default user name which is different from rest of my other Linux boxes; so that it becomes easy to ssh or scp instead of suppying the user name everytime … so thought of having the same username even for mac terminal. Instead of creating a new user, I tried to rename the existing one using the utility ‘niutil‘ which comes part of the base OS.

Which actually renamed ‘olduser’ to ‘newuser’, and upon rebooting everything started working. Even when I goto terminal I can see the new user instead of old user.

But the actual problem started when I needed to install any applications or utilities as it needs sudo access. As the olduser is part of sudoers, but the new user is not. I am not sure how it broke..now entering old user and password does not work nor the new one as the password was same for both the users as I never changed them….so, the only option left for me to rebuild the whole system…as I lost the sudo account and I cant even enter to root mode, nor I can enable the root account; which needs sudo access. Either way completely broken..

Before running the niutil I should have added the new user to the sudoers file; that might have worked out or enabling the root user before changing to new user…anyway, its too late… time for reinstall

Today I tried to merge my Boot Camp partition to the normal disk using Boot Camp. In the Boot Camp Assistant wizard, I selected an option to merge the Boot Camp partition to primary Mac HD, and it asked to reboot, so I did a reboot..

During the reboot, it didn’t boot back to OS even for 25 minutes and whole time it was just showing the white screen; which normally appears just before you get the ‘Apple Logo’…As there is no verbose info printed on to screen about what is happening nor it booted to OS, I almost decided to recycle the power…luckily I suddenly noticed the Apple Logo and it started booting to OS.

Its real annoy for me..Either Boot Camp should have instructed that during reboot it needs to merge the partition and will take time or it should have printed some verbose information on what is happening..as Windows normally prints any verbose input during the boot time, which makes it much easier for anybody to understand what is happening…you can’t ask end user to sit and watch blank white screen for 30 minutes for what so ever…

Today I received the 15″ Macbook Pro (2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB RAM, 120 GB 5600 RPM). And am really stunned with the real cool packaging from Apple. No surprise, why everyone loves to open Apple boxes.

As this is first ever Mac for me, and it took me lot of time to figure it out how to use and where to go for what when the OS booted. I had a hard time to open any file as single click or double click from trackpad doesn’t work as it does in regular PCs along with missing right click button from the trackpad. Anyway, fought with trackpad and keyboard settings and shortcuts to have right mouse and other things to work. So, I decided to install Windows Vista on this MacBook, as I wasn’t quite ready with Mac yet to figure out what to use out of the box. Anyway, I need Visual Studio 2005 to be up and running, so I need to have Windows anyway.

I installed Parallels build 3188 and configured 32GB for Vista Ultimate along with allotting 1GB to this virtual machine. The installation went smooth and base OS started working, except the real cool Aero theme. The performance is also not that bad. But the look and feel is not what I wanted along with fonts which are not that clear for reading, so I decided to go for BootCamp instead.

Again downloaded and installed BootCamp Beta 1.2 and configured to install Vista on to this by alloting fixed 32GB for this. And this time, the actual fun started once the system booted. I installed Mac drivers which I created during the initial setup during BootCamp Assistance. Once all drivers are loaded, Its really cool to see Vista on Mac along with Aero Theme. It was much much faster than running Windows Vista on Dell Latitude D820 with the similar yet better configuration, and am going to stick to using Windows Vista Ultimate on my MacBook Pro for time being. The Windows Vista experience index score was 4.7; which is a pretty good deal. The lowest score 4.7 is from the Graphics card. I installed Office 2007 and Visual Studio 2005 and its SP1; I can see that every application starts instantly and does not take much time. I need to profile my build timings to see if I can get any better performance from Mac. Kudos to BootCamp team and the folks who added the support for the Windows drivers. The latest Beta 1.2 does have all the drivers needed for Vista Ultimate to work. I see from Device Manager that none of the components has Yellow mark or missing drivers.

Here is the few tweaks I made to have betterment as I hailed from the world of PCs.

• Configured the trackpad to support right click with two fingers
• Better trackpad speed and key touch
• Installed InsanelyMac Input Remapper 1.0.01 Beta to have support for rest of the mac keys (like volume, brightness adjustment etc)

Few cons:

• I did not like the trackpad getting stuck at times and it doesn’t move when needed, its frustrating
• On Mac, not sure why I can not open or run a program with a single or double click; and I always need to right click and open it
• Not yet figured it out how to use mac iSight on Vista; but I can see that the driver is installed and ready to use.

The final point is, If you want to see the real cool fun of Windows Vista along with Mac features then try installing Vista on Mac using BootCamp…It would not dissapoint you.