Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Windows 7 on the macbook pro

Today we try windows 7 ultimate on a macbook pro. I used to run xp some years ago on the original macbook but forgot to shut windows down one day and it did not go to sleep because of a buggy boot camp driver and ended up burning out the airport wireless. Let's see how we fare now.

There is no reason to run window 7 on this as it is running xp inside of osx (via virtualbox) anyway, but this gives me a laptop for just about anything.

The target machine is a 15" macbook pro with 4 gig ram, 250gig hard drive, intel core 2 duo running at 2.4 ghz and nvidia 8600m GT dedicated graphics. To make it run full speed we decide to go the boot camp route.

Boot camp no longer requires a cd/dvd, you run the book camp app in the utilities folder and decide how much hard disk space to allot to windows. I choose 50 gig. It then asks you to insert the windows install media and runs the windows 7 installation program. You choose advanced or optional setup and select a partition. Windows will complain it cannot install there as it is not the right format. We select drive 0 partition 3 boot camp and click on the windows disk utility and format the partition as NTFS.

Windows then formats the partition, copies over it's numerous files and starts the install. This takes quite a bit of time so we start a quick game of civ2...

finally we get to the setup and create an account and get to the home network. Odd how the win7 gui reminds me of an earlier version of osx.

Ok it starts up but the isight is not working. Network is ok. I'll have to find the drivers for the macbook for win 7 tomorrow...ah, if you run windows update it gets the driver for the video and some other things.

Once installed it boots automatically into windows. In the old boot camp there was a control panel in windows to set the boot back to osx, i don't see it anymore so how to return to osx? I found it in the control panel, system and security.

Ah, here is a good guide:

http://www.simplehelp.net/2009/01/15/using-boot-camp-to-install-windows-7-on-your-mac-the-complete-walkthrough/ which says to do this:

Insert your OS X Leopard (or Snow Leopard) DVD. When prompted, select Run setup.exe. Note: If you’re using Snow Leopard and a message pops up saying “Remote Install Mac OS X”, close that window and eject the CD. Put the CD in again and this time select “Open folder to view files”, navigate to the Bootcampfolder, and run setup.exe.

Looks like this is needed in able to get back to osx - as windows probably toasts the existing boot loader (why you need to install windows 1st before linux on a dual boot machine). So we haul out the 10.6 retail box and insert the dvd.

Works as advertised. Remember to remove the snow leopard cd before rebooting.

When your Mac boots, hold down the Option key to select which Operating System you want to boot into.

There will be 2 hard drive icons shown, your apple one and a hard drive called windows. Select the windows drive. Next we install the apple bootcamp update by running Apple Software update in windows. This loads ver 3.1 which updates some of the drivers.

The macbook gets a little hot during all this updating, i have a fan control applet in osx that cranks up the fans - need to find something similar for winddoze.

Summary

Windows 7 ultimate on a macbook pro looks nice and is fast. I must say the Aero window manager is very nice looking.

How useful windows 7 is remains to be seen, but because work is a windows-centric IT place i have to use it sometimes, although there is no longer any compelling reason to do so. Many years ago a windows upgrade would have been exciting, today it is ho hum as everything i need can be done is Ubuntu or OSX and in fact there are things i do there that i can't do easily in windows without purchasing a lot of software or fiddling around in windows innards. During the years windows tried to take over the world with phones, zune's, xboxes and such it lost sight of updating it's os and many people left for better options. Wonder if it will get them back? Probably not - would you return to IE after many years on Firefox and Safari?

PS

Ran the windows experience index and got a score of: 5.1 which is caused by the slower hard drive, the other scores were all 5.9





Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Reading Books on the iTouch

Earlier we had hacked liam's nintendo DS so we could read ebooks on it. And it works but i don't carry around a DS so i wanted to turn the iTouch into a ebook reader.

When i got the device i immediately jailbroke it so the first step was to restore it to default and install the latest version 3 of the os. Next i downloaded the Stanza ebook app along with the apple ebook reader, the kindle and kobo ebook apps and the dropbox app. I wanted to explore various methods of using the device. The kindle and kobo approach is to tie your mobile device to an online store (like the itunes store) and i don't like that approach. I want to be able to put any ebook on it and to download from multiple sources or transfer directly from my computer.

First off we tested the stanza ebook app. This works well and has a section for free online book sources such as Gutenbery and Feedbooks as well as a link to my fav publisher, O'Reilly and some vanity presses. It is not obvious how to add additional sources, for example - can i add a local source such as a web server on my home network as a source of books?

We also downloaded the stanza desktop app for the mac, this allows you to read books on a desktop which is ok, but more usefully it lets you convert books between different formats.

Unfortunately, the instructions on the stanza web site on copying books to the itouch from itunes are obsolete (or written for the pc version of itunes). It's odd that i was able to import a bunch of pdf ebooks into itunes to the books library and that there is a books library on the itouch, but there does not seem to be a way to sync the books from the desktop itunes to the itouch. Perhaps they have to be in a different format? The apple web site notes that you need ios 4 or better which means 2nd gen itouch and mine is 1st gen so there is no books tab in the itouch window when the device is selected.

We decide to try to download some books from our web server on the home network. For the mac desktop this is http://localhost which corresponds to library\WebServer\Documents and it has a default web page of index.html which we delete. Next we copy a folder of ebooks in various formats to this folder. We discover that file permissions must be set so that everyone can read them.

We fire up Safari on the itouch and goto http://192.168.1.105 and browse the ebooks folder and select sharpe's skirmish in epub format. But because it is in epub format the web browser cannot open it and there is no way to download. Same for other formats. I was able to open and read html, txt, and pdf because they are supported by safari.

The other option is to use a website that is supported by stanza. So we head off to: http://bookworm.oreilly.com and create an account. It turns out i already created one last year and had uploaded a few books. The idea was to test out reading in bed using a netbook. This was not a success as i found the netbook screen just too small and the device uncomfortable to hold for long periods and so went back to printed books for bedtime reading. So now we decide to upload a Richard Dawkins book in epub format.

This works fine and next we turn to the itouch and run Safari and goto http://m.bookworm.oreilly.com and sign in to our account. All out books are listed. We click on the arrow next to the Dawkins book that says Read in Stanza and the stanza app is automatically loaded and the book is downloaded to the itouch. It works but it got the title wrong.

This works but we would have to convert books from the common chm and pdf formats to epub. And what about all our comics in cbr ad cbz format? A batch process would be useful here, the workflow (automator?) would be to pick up all new books in a file folder and convert to epub format and store in an uploads folder to moving to the bookworm web site. How secure is bookworm and how much storage do you get? I would prefer a local solution - how do you make a web-site stanza ready? It would be a very useful plug-in for Joomla or Drupal or Wordpress. Perhaps the workflow script could be modified to:

- convert ebook files to epub
- upload files to web server
- parse author/title info and enter in the mysql database
- create an xml file with the data for use by stanza
- build html code based on xml file and display as part of a catalog of books

I see people have come up with some solutions to the problem such as this post by cornfed

- use the program CalibreDBxtractor
- see http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62332

CalibreDBxtractor also builds web pages that you can turn on or off at the time of build, the function of downloading the ebooks or just showing the discription of the ebook. The program is now called calibre2opds and is hosted at https://launchpad.net/calibre2opds and requires java and calibre. The progam basically uses the Calibre ebook reader to produce an OPDS compatible xml catalog complete with cross-references and links to web pages. OPDS is the open publication distribution system. From the google code web site:

The Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) Catalog is a syndication format for electronic publications based on Atom RFC4287 and HTTP RFC2616. Catalogs enable the aggregation, distribution, discovery, and acquisition of electronic publications. OPDS Catalogs use existing or emergent open standards and conventions, with a priority on simplicity. This work is part of the BookServer project: http://www.archive.org/bookserver

This looks good. Hey, since the output is html i could use my public folder on dropbox as a testbed.

Monday, December 20, 2010

My Dinner with Windows 7

Installing Windows 7

After a previous disaster (my evening with Vista), that ended up with a lot of cursing, hurt feelings and a windows divorce, I was loath to try Windows 7. But half the computer lab is now 7, and the new students will arrive bearing laptops with 7 and the attendant problems. So i have to learn it so i can be of some help.

This all started when passing the usual dumpster spot i noticed a familiar looking computer. It was a dell precision 450, the little brother of my main desktop (dell precision 470, 2 x 3.4Ghz xeon's, 1.5tb, 6gig ddr2). Students had taken the optical drives, video card and ram but the innards (esp the dual cpu's) looked good so i had to bring him home.



Digging through the parts box resulted in 2 gig of ddr ram, ati radeon 128mb video card, a combo dvd/cdrw and a 250 gig hard drive. Put it together and fire it up and viola, a dual xeon (2.4Ghz) box with HT. Then it stuck me, this would be a good machine to try out windows 7 and i could connect it to the new 32" toshiba lcd with vga, dvi and hdmi (xmas present).

The windows 7 install went smoothly, unlike Vista which for some reason couldn't connect to microsoft's server and i had to telephone an autobot to get a validation number to enter. When it was all done i ran the 'windows experience score' and found most things scored 4.5 - 5, except as expected the ancient ati radeon 128mb video card (a score of 1). This had a max resolution of 1024 x 768 and the included windows driver was not accelerated. Tried to download and install a ATI driver without success.
Here is the windows 7 desktop showing the 4 cores in action. Note the Vista desktop background, the only thing i liked about vista! (I even use it on my ubuntu desktop...). The windows update did not fix the video problem but installed the correct driver for the analog devices ad1918b integrated sound chip, which was good as i wanted to try out the media functions microsoft advertising so heavily. I had tested the media center xp edition as a possible living room media center but it was very lacking and thus discarded.

Anyway, with the sound now hooked up to the Spherex sound system (grab one of these if you can find it) and the video sort of working (480p only) we plugged in our windows media center remote and after a few minutes telling it where the media files are located (on a server) and removing the default local options we had a media center.

The audio part works well and goes off to the internet to display the cover art. The look and operation of the 7 media center is very familiar to users of XBMC. I just played mp3's to start from one machine, the main media server has only FLAC files, although the mac pro runs connect 360 and so serves audio files from iTunes. Yet to test if the media center can pick up the connect 360 and TVersity upnp media servers.

We next test out the image function and it works fine. I like it better than the media center client update on the XBOX 360. The last update has slowed the image viewing down and made it more clunky to use.
The big test is movies, it is a media center after all - music and pictures are nice but it HAS to play movies well. And here it all comes crashing down. It took forever to pick up the 976 movies from the server and each time you click the movies option it seems to have to do it again instead of being instantaneous. And the display - butt ugly, where are the movie covers? I watch (and buy) a lot of movies, so i expect and need a good interface. I also like the MKV format (see MakeMKV for mac) but like FLAC for audio, windows lags behind the times. Not only could i not play my MKV video but also the MOV (quicktime) and a bunch of AVI's. A media player MUST play all formats and not just the ones the company decides it has deals with - so now we have to spend a lot of time hacking windows media player yet again to get it to play common file formats.

Summary

Overall, i give windows 7 a B+, it is not totally useless like Vista and did not get in my way much for common tasks. It does the job competently. The GUI is nice (and will be a lot nicer and faster once i add an ATI 4670) and it ran surprising well on just 2 gig of ram (soon to be 4 gig).

The major failing for a consumer OS is the lack of robust digital audio and video support for common formats. Business won't care about that (maybe it is a feature for enterprises!). Basically microsoft doesn't get the digital world anyway....proof - Zune - the 'ipod killer', windows smart phones - 'the ipod/android killer' and their new tablet - 'the ipad killer'...

Ya right..

PS

So i go to add a printer. It's a network printer at 192.168.1.2 but windows fails to discover it on the network. So i Add Printer manually and put in the IP address. It then presents a list of manufactures, and surprise Apple is no longer listed. My laser printers are Apple postscript so i search for a generic postscript driver but that is no longer there and Adobe doesn't provide one anymore. The solution was to choose a postscript level 2 printer like the Lexmark Optra Ep PS and install that. It worked (which is should, that's the idea behind postscript...) and the test page printed perfectly on my ancient Apple Laserwriter...

-------------------
Dell Precision 450, dual xeon cpu's @ 2.4 Ghz, 2 gig DDR ram, 250 gig hard drive, ati radeon 9200

UPDATE

Replaced the existing processors with two 3.2 Ghz 1mb cache hyperthreaded cpu's. Interesting in that when windows starts it updates a driver and requires you to reboot. The cpu score went from 4.5 to 5.0, a moderate improvement. I also upgraded the ram from 2 gig to 4 gig which raised that score to 5.0, all we need now is to install the 1 gig video card which should arrive tomorrow. The end result is a usable windows 7 box for about $240 in upgrades to a freebie..

Update 2

The ATI HD 4600 card arrived and is installed. Take 2 slots. Odd is that it is listed as having 1275 mb of total graphics memory but that only 1000 mb is actually on the video card and 251 mb is shared system memory. I don't want memory shared, that is the whole point of a dedicated graphic card vs onboard graphics! However, i can find no setting to change this. We rerun the performance index and the graphics score has gone from 1.0 to 6.7 so now the slowest component is the ram at 5.0! I check the bios but no setting on shared memory but i did change the agp aperture setting from 256 to 32mb.

Update:

Appalling! I just started up a small 1 gig copy operation of 13,000 files and basically it totally ties up the file manager window. I've never run across this in OSX or Ubuntu. Other windows can be operated and you can run a second copy of the windows explorer file manager to perform file tasks while the copy operation is going on but the original file manager window did not respond until the copying was complete.

Horrible! Windows 7 managed to scramble the file system on my USB stick while copying a file! It now cannot read the stick and wants to reformat it as there is 'no recognizable file system'. The stick will not mount on osx or ubuntu so it has to be reformatted. This never happened in XP, the primary rule is 'do no harm', how can a file copy corrupt and entire file system?

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Upgrading the G4

We have an ancient 800mhz G4 ibook that is still quite useful as it is only 12" in size and is fairly light as the internal cd/dvd drive died and was removed. However, it cannot run any os later than 10.4 because the install program checks the cpu speed and if it is less than 867Mhz the program will not work.

However, there is a workaround, basically fake the cpu speed by reporting it to the OS as 900mhz.
First we goto http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/26562/leopardassist and download the leopard assist program. This sets up the trick and restarts the machine.

We hook up an external firewire drive and boot the install DVD from that. Click install and away we go...

and after a few minutes it is complete. So how does 10.5 run on an 800mhz G4 with 1.25mb of ram? not bad, i wouldn't run garageband on it but it does well as a web surfer and email machine.