Venu Anuganti Blog

As we all know Windows Vista introduced a security feature called User Acount Contol (UAC) to strengthen the overall security level by enforcing the administrator authorization privilege.

This is indeed a good thing; similar to what root or sudo access does in case of Mac or Linux environment. But; even if the user is in administrator domain still Vista pops up a administrator dialog box for copy or delete operation to restrict the access. Which at times is annoy to me. If the user is not in admin group; then it makes sense; but even when user is under administrator domain; then there is no point to have this for every operation.

Indeed this becomes much more complicated when dealing with the system files copy or delete from command line. At times it is frustrating. For example; when you have a visual studio DLL project which generates a DLL which is automatically copied to system32 directory using custom build will fail without any useful errors as shown below:


Performing Custom Build Step
Access is denied.
0 file(s) copied.
Project : error PRJ0019: A tool returned an error code from "Performing Custom Build Step"


Nor from any regular command line:

c:\>type venu.txt
test file for copy
c:\>copy venu.txt c:\Windows\System32\
Access is denied.
0 file(s) copied.


So, to get rid of this; I have to completely disable the UAC from Start -> Control Panel -> User Accounts -> Turn User Account Control on or off and then uncheck the box ‘Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer‘; and after a restart I can copy and do all kind of operations as that of XP.

It will be nice if Microsoft would allow this by default if the user is already in administrator domain. Not susre if there is any alternative way.

As I had two Macbook Pro’s with the same identical configuration (one personal and another one from company that I got it couple of weeks back); so I decided to sell my personal one and after posting the ad in craigslist for a resonable price..I had more than 10 people in the queue to buy it. Man, the apple is going nowhere, thanks for its hype…So, sold to someone who came first.

Now, its again time for shopping for another laptop, but this time I will be opting for PC based one as I already have another Macbook pro. Most probably will consider Dell Vostro 1400 if not some other closer models with the following set of configuration as I again will use VMWare on top of the system to run Linux:

• Light weight
• Core 2 duo/quad with decent clock speed
• 1 GB RAM (I already have 1 GB extra RAM, so it will be 2GB in total)
• 1440×900 is a min resolution
• Must be < 1500$

If you have any other recommendation, please drop me a note.

As I upgraded to VMWare Fusion RC1 recently based on the comments from Ben G from VMWare as RC1 supports Global keys, experimental Suspend and Revoke, Snapshots and Unity features. The upgraded one is really doing good especially the performance and overall appearance. In case if you have the older build of Fusion, I recommend going ahead with the newer one.

As I wrote earlier, by default the suspend feature is not enabled. So, you have to manually enable it by changing suspend.disabled= “TRUE” to “FALSE” from the file ~/Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/Virtual\ Machines/Boot\ Camp*/Boot\ Camp\ partition.vmwarevm/Boot\ Camp\ partition.vmx; which makes it easy to suspend and revoke the OS within the virtual environment. That seemed to work for few days and lately I noticed a strange problem.

Since a day or so, whenever I needed to suspend my guest Vista OS within fusion, it pops up a login dialog to enter the sudo access and then it hangs and nothing that it takes..nor I can type anything in dialog and the fan starts spinning like anything. I can’t get the control back to either of the OS; so only option is to recycle the power and start both the OS back.

As an alternative I tried to disable the suspend feature (suspend.disabled= "TRUE"); then the Vista doesn’t even boot to the OS and it just hangs as blank screen after the initial bios process. Looks like there is some suspend state which fusion uses is causing this; and boots back fine without any problem once I enable the suspend feature.

I thought this was fixed lately by VMWare Fusion and Parallels. But at least with VMWare Fusion, I am still asked to re-activate when I boot from one version to another one. For example, Microsoft office 2007, I must re-activate back when I boot to bootcamp Windows Vista and also, when I reboot back to Virtual Vista using Fusion Bootcamp. So, in other terms, I need to re-activate the product whenever I change the boot process from one to another; which is really annoy.

Also, even Windows Vista ultimate needs re-activation when I change the boot to direct bootcamp Vista from virtual one telling hardware changes are detected; but booting back to Virtual vista does not need a re-activation. But when you reboot back to direct bootcamp version, again it will ask you to re-activate.

This is really messy…I am using MSDN Enterprise License of Vista Ultimate Edition and Office 2007 Enterprise with VMWare Fusion RC1.

As VMWare Fusion RC1 started supporting Global keys, which was handy for me to switch between two desktops using Virtue desktop manager as I keep one desktop for Fusion Vista in full-screen mode and another one for Mac OS X. Switching between them when Fusion started supporting global keys is easy (CTRL + ALT / OPTION + Left or right arrow).

Actually this is well needed feature that I was expecting even in my 10 wishes to run Windows on Mac. But actual problem started when I started using Visual Studio 2005. As Visual Studio is my default working environment for most of the C/C++ projects that currently I develop, the editor becomes unusable as F and CTRL + F combination keys are treated as global keys by Fusion and invokes Mac activities. So, I can not even do a search using shortcut keys nor debug a program(F5, F9, F10..). So, I have to manually turn them off in Fusion (Menu -> Preferences -> Uncheck Enable Mac OS Keyboard shortcuts) inorder to get the visual studio to work. So, currently am back to basic without Global key support in Fusion. I know that Parallels supports this global keys, not sure how it acts if another application within guest OS has the same key combination. I still think Fusion should first give the preference to local guest OS and then pass it on to host OS instead of directly to host.

After reading the comment from Ben on my 10 wishes to improve Windows experience on Mac, I upgraded my VMWare Fusion Beta 3 to Release Candidate 1 (RC 1), build 50460.

After the upgrade the things seemed to be as it was with the old Beta 3 without much difference. So, I thought of reinstalling the VMWare tools; and once I re-installed; whole thing made a big difference. Now it accepts global system keys along with Unity feature. Even though the Unity feature is not working as I expected, but coherence still has the upper hand on this. May be I did not tested the Unity with XP to compare, but Coherence with Vista is much much better.

Most importantly; it now supports the boot camp suspend and restore mechanism, which is very handy to me. I have to enable the suspend feature by changing suspend.disabled= "TRUE" to "FALSE" from the file ~/Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/Virtual\ Machines/Boot\ Camp/%2Fdev%2Fdisk0/Boot\ Camp\ partition.vmwarevm/Boot\ Camp\ partition.vmx; and after restarting the Fusion, I can suspend and resume the Boot camp Vista OS within virtual machine.

For the whole day, I noticed three major issues after the upgrade to RC1:

• Randomly Bootcamp Vista hung twice within the Fusion, which made me to restart the guest OS .. not sure what caused this.. but I noticed the OS as if is not accepting any keys and I tried all combinations.. the host Mac OS works fine and global keys works as expected and the macbook fan keeps spinning like anything during that time…so, after closing and restarting the Fusion, the things works back… Need to find why this is happening as its not a good sign .. may be I need to enable the debug options, so that I can send the report to the team.. lets play that over weekend.
• Macbook hung in the middle of the upgrade process of VMWare tools for the first time, and after the restart the things seemed to be OK.
• Fusion freezes after the Vista boots when snapshots are enabled from Boot Camp partition.vmx, so I have to disable the snapshots and stick to suspend and restore for time being.

Looks like there is still some work from the Fusion team before they can go ahead with the actual production release, but its pretty much close to stable state and we have to appreciate the amount of features they started supporting and lately the performance and user experience is much much better and improving for every release.