The Wahyudiharto's Blog

I've currently using Mac OSX for couple months & -- hard-to-say -- so unwilling to returning back to my previous OS :) Now, I found a pretty beauty UI with complete light-weight professional tools even by (some) native packages OSX installation. On this chance, I'd like to share a continuously article revealing any great things inside OSX. It could be an interesting article purposed to anyone who planned to learn OSX from others OS.

There were 3 previous articles completely describing about step-by-step of preparing & installing Mac OSX on an X86 machine (Acer Aspire One - 8.9" screen). It also a good start for you:

• Dual Boot Windows XP & Leopard in AOA150 (Part 1 - Pre Installation)
• Dual Boot Windows XP & Leopard in AOA150 (Part 2 - Installation)
• Dual Boot Windows XP & Leopard in AOA150 (Part 3 - Post Installation)

#1. So, How to Show Disk Space?

It's a different treatment to find out how to show disk space on Mac. Choose Get Info menu from a partition (right-click) in Finder & it'll show the information.

Or, it just the same way in Linux via "df" command in Terminal :)


#2. Hey, My Keyboard Shortcut is Changed!
Don't panic - at least I also experience this too on my first attempt :). Take a look at keyboard comparison picture below. This is common keyboard layout (Acer Aspire One):

While this below is Apple standard keyboard:

Focus on red-box & compare with this below explanation picture:

Voila, you're on your way now! So, If you want to copying file (for example), press Alt+C instead of common Ctrl+C, and so on. A very complete keyboard shortcut description you may found at http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1343

#3. How to PrintScreen?

If your PrtSc button on keyboard is not working to take a copy of screen (or need to change other keyboard shortcut), visit Keyboard & Mouse in Preference window. Make an appropriate key for this function & your button will work now. As you may seen on image above, the F13 button is known as PrtSc button in Mac. If you pressed it, then it'll grab the screen and store it to a file on your desktop. Happy a little practise :)

#4. Another Way to Grab the Screen

If trick #3 doesn't satisfied you, then grab the Grab. There's 4 capture modes available depends on your need.

#5. An Apple () logo. How?
Simply press Shift+Windows+K. But it doesn't recognized in Facebook :(

#6. Built-in Stickies

Do you know that OSX provides (even) tiny sticky note tools? Go get it from Application in Finder.

#7. Automatic Wallpaper Changer

OSX also equipped with this fun too. Open the Preferences window, then point it to Desktop & Screen Saver icon. Set your photo folder, then change the period to activate this feature.

#8. Need Virtual Desktop? There's Spaces

Press F8 to activate this feature. Anyway, you can also move existing application from one screen to another

#9. Spotlight, a Smart Search Engine!

A smart search engine always available on your right-top-corner screen. I was testing it to find a Metallica song with title of The Call of Ktulu. Tested with typing the spotligiht with "Call" word & it resulting out-of expectation! Look at the red circle: 1st circle show the definition taken from Dictionary application. 2nd circle show the image file. 3rd circle display the content of PDF document & last, here's what I've looking for. Pretty informative!

#10. Spotlight as Calculator

Need a calculator? Use Spotlight. But, hey... what's the different with this below picture?


#11. Save As PDF?

Sure! If you're on hurry to make a PDF from a web page (or any applications which have print function), fortunately this OS has a built-in PDF driver on Printer settings.

#12. More Than a Just Preview

Known as multi-preview application such as image & PDF document. But it's more than that, since it fully equipped with basic image tools from resizing image, cropping, displaying multi files on a same window, slideshow function, rotate image & annotation editor! It seems I don't need Adobe Photoshop anymore :)

#13. QuickLook from Finder

Another built-in multi type preview available from Finder. Check it out from thumbnail mode (left red circle) or simply press QuickLook icon (right red circle)!

#14. Text Editor? Use TextEdit

Here's a marriage between Notepad & Wordpad, not suitable for programmer though :)

#15. Vote for Web Designer

Is there any OS support for defining web color natively other than Mac OSX? Again -- all I can say -- it's more than just a preview function in Preview application. Do you think it's not quite enough? There's also DigitalColor Meter you can found on Application :: Utilities too :)


#16. A Real Web Developer OS!

No doubt, with the existence of Mac version of Macromedia Dreamweaver, this OS helping me a lot as a web developer. With XAMPP availability for free, I've successfully made an online application project (http://www.arisanperhiasan.com) in a week built from scratch with Mac OSX.

Labels: Acer Aspire One, Apple, Mac OSX86

Hello, meet me again in the last part of trilogy-articles: iAtkos dual boot with Windows XP on Acer Aspire 150ZG a.k.a AOA 150. The first article reviewing about The Pre-Installation (preparing partition, etc), while second article describes about The Installation it-self (selecting packages, etc). And now, the post-installation will tell you about configuring hardware (VGA), some miscellaneous things & also third party applications which can make your Mac much useful than your previous desktop :)

Post-Installation

Let Mac running on its first boot. Just to make sure that there's no something wrong with the boot loader (known as Chameleon boot loader). On mine, it'll display 5 partitions while loading boot screen (with Mac as the default boot).



Try to boot without parameter, it'll show a loading screen.



Be patient until it changes to a Welcome screen. Note that until this point, you should hear audio with music.



Go ahead & follow the wizards. On a create account wizard, Mac also try to detecting the webcam. In AOA 150, it detected successfully.



Continue the wizards until it show the first desktop screen with 800x600 resolution.



This is where you will do The setup for video drivers. Reboot in single user, -s option at the loader (while on Chameleon boot loader, press any key to enter setup). Now type -s you should see boot: -s on the bottom left hand side of the screen, now press enter and it should boot you into single user mode. The command prompt will look like this:

:/ root#

now type:

/sbin/fsck -fy
/sbin/mount -uw /

Don't forget that / after -uw or you will not have write access. Next, type exactly as I describe below or you will hate your life =)

cd System/Library
rm -r Extensions.mkext
cd Extensions
rm -r AppleIntelGMA*.*
rm -r AppleIntelIntergrated[TAB]
shutdown -r now

Don't type exactly the [TAB], just hit the TAB key and it will fill in the rest for you and press enter. Above commands will remove the kext cache and all of the Intel Graphic drivers because they do not work correctly (stuck at 800x600). The system should now reboot. If all went well you should be at the desktop again.

Ok, the first thing to do after it completed to show desktop is continuing to configure the VGA (Remember when there's no VGA driver packages selected during installation?). So, prepare your internet connection & download this VGA driver package (intel_iatkos7.zip) (2.4MB). Once you extract this file to desktop, you should have these folders:

OSXTools1.0.150
First
Second

Now Start OSXTools and click Install Kexts. Browse to the dir First and select all (3) kexts, click Install button. After it installed, just DON'T REBOOT (even pop-up show asking to reboot). If you reboot, you will have to go into single user mode again and remove all the files again.

Now open the folder Second and click on GMA950.pkg and a setup window will pop up. Click continue, click install -- put in your password if you have one and proceed. After install, you can now reboot.

Once you reboot you should be back at the OS X desktop but now with working 1024x600 resolution! Also, you can now enable Quartz. To enable Quartz, open OSX86 Tools and click the Enable/Disable Quartz GL button. It will tell you the current status. If its disabled, feel free to enable it by clicking the button that says "Enable Quartz GL". After Quartz is enables, the system will need to rebooted.

You should now be fully working on OS X 10.5.7. The first software I've install was USB modem manager (T-Mobile web'n'walk Manager Installer included on stick), even the system recognized the stick as a modem.



Start internet connection configuration from System Preferences (the shortcut laid on the dock) & configure it as usual (tested with IM2 & Telkomsel Flash provider). If your configuration is correct, now you don't have a problem to connect to internet.



Open Safari browser & try to open a web page. Meanwhile, you can also try to chat with iChat (compatible with GMail account). If you need more to personalize your OSX application, get a "basic" home-office-application from the internet (or torrent). As I only need for web programming, here's below the list of application I'd installed on my OS X.

* Macromedia Dreamweaver 8
* Adobe Photopshop CS2
* XAMPP (Web & MySQL server)
* Firefox
* Sequel Pro (a great MySQLFront or HeidiSQL replacement for Mac)
* Cyberduck (a great WinSCP replacement for Mac)
* UltraEdit for Mac
* Microsoft Office for Mac
* Microsoft Messenger (chat with Yahoo friends)
* unRAR
* uTorrent for Mac

And this is my dock view now...



For anyone who confusing about shortcut keyboard on OS X, there's a bit different between Windows/Linux. If you familiar with CTRL key (eg: CTRL+C to copy, and so on), use ALT instead of CTRL (So, it change to ALT+C to copy). I've been using this OS X for full since a month ago for work & I feel so endure with it. Maybe I'll thinking about to buy a real Mac soon :) For anyone of you who dare to install OS X, have a try & good luck. Please share your experience on below comments...

Labels: Acer Aspire One, Apple, Mac OSX86

Welcome back! If you googling over the internet, actually there's tons of OSX86 step-by-step installation guides you can follow. This wiki page also good for you to start & note that whether your machine listed on it's HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) or not. If you certainly sure about to installing it, please take a time to follow my previous part (The Pre-Installation) & continued to read through this current article.

Installation

After preparing the partition (16GB on my experiment), plugged-in the DVD master (I'm using iAtkos 10.5.7) & make your machine boot to CD. In my Acer Aspire One ZG5, there's no additional boot parameter needed. If you experience a problem (such as failed on loading), you should need to by-pass parameter "cpus=1" in boot prompt (or -v to show debug verbose mode).



First screen passed. Next to show is the first window wizard. Click Next, then.



A welcome window may appear. Let's continue until it show menubar on top of the screen.



The first thing you should check is your target hfs partition you've made. There's a tool called Disk Utility available from Utility menu. If your target partition is not visible than you might need to re-erase & re-format it (don't changed the volume type combo box).



After - optionally - erasing process completed, close the Disk Utility & you'll see your target partition on Select a Destination window (mine, 16GB size, partition #7 - primary, known as disk0s4; means located on disk 0, primary no#4).



The critical part of Mac OS installation on x86 machine is selecting the right packages for your machine. Here's a full list that 100% working installation of iAtkos 10.5.7 on my Acer Aspire One (including sound & wired networking).



Note that there's no VGA driver selected. Don't worry, it's not applicable to Acer Aspire One. We'll skip this package & take care of it later. If you'd like to force it, than you'll stuck with 800x600 resolution or your screen may garbled or your system may hang on boot!



Installing process will take approximately 30 minutes. Make a hot of coffee & light-up your cigarettes, this installation will done & everything is gonna be alright :). See you in 3rd part of this articles!

Labels: Acer Aspire One, Mac OSX86

In fact, this idea has comes couple months ago until I've got a bit of time now about to doing this experiment. Actually, it was started from my last observation 3 years ago with Tiger in my Travelmate which I knew there's lots of weaknesses on that version.

Anyway - on this chance, I'd like to give a short detail documentation about step-by-step installing Leopard for x86 Intel non-Mac machine in my Acer Aspire One. For more, this Leo has comes with iAtkos 10.5.7 package (next to ToH 10.4.8 - Tiger - in my prior experiment).

This is the first note from total 3 articles I've planned to. And this article begin with pre-installation.

Pre-Installation

First, assumed you already have a Windows installed on your local harddrive as your primary OS. No matter how much your partition are, prepare 1 partition at 7GB at minimal & create it as an active primary partition (not logical or extended). If you're not a pro users, let 3rd party of Windows partitioning tools to assist you on this. Partition Magic or EASUS partitioning tools works great. As in my experiment, below is the image of my netbook partitioning table.



On above image, my target partition is the last column with 16 GB of size. A formatting is an optional, but if you need to doing this, a FAT filesystem is just fine.



Formatting the partition just to make sure that you're just create a fixed new partition.



After it created successfully, exit from partitioning tool & execute a command prompt to create a HFS file system (default file system in Macintosh). Just type diskpart & follow the following command I attached to the image below:



The first command is list disk, it'll display the number of the disk attached to the computer. Select the appropriated disk number, then show the partition with list partition command. As shown on red box, my target partition is listed as partition #7. Type select the partition number & delete it by giving delete partition command. Next, to create a HFS filesystem, type create partition primary id=af. It'll create a primary HFS partition. To make sure that you're succeed creating it, type again list partition command. Now it become an Unknown of partition type. That's ok. Last, exit from command prompt and continued to slot-in Leo master (from DVD or USB) & prepare for boot after restarting the computer.

The pre-installation is complete. I'll giving you the installation process in a short time. Stay tune on this blog & have a nice day....

Labels: Acer Aspire One, Mac OSX86

Thousands of blog writers has been reviewing about how succeeded they were after installing Fedora 13 on their various machine. Anyway, I will not write the same things in this article, sorry. As a runner distro – after Ubuntu at first as listed on distrowatch.com-, Goddard seems to be a more human friendly or might become a future Linux desktop. Don't worry, this is my judgment – as far as I'm concerned after I've proofed my self on my Aspire One AOA 150. It's signed by the whole parts of hardware which had been detected correctly by the kernel without using any tweak or hack. Well, this is not happened even when I using Fedora 10 a years ago.

I still loved Fedora - than Ubuntu – because it's a derivative from the ancestor - Red Hat. However, now my favorite desktop manager has moved to Gnome from KDE. In my opinion, Gnome offering a simple desktop, fast, light & weight than latest KDE. Again, this is relative judgment. But one thing for sure, most users like their desktop because of it's appearance. For example, many users moved to Windows Se7en because of it's skin (but it doesn't works for me since I still using XP for some works & games).

Mac4Lin on Fedora 13
I beat that workers who live with computer (like me, red) is always keep the desktop as useful & unique personalized as it can be. Talking about personalizing desktop – especially on Gnome – lots of themes available to apply. After a day busy on completing package I need – including enabling 3D compiz, now comes a time to personalize my desktop. There's no beautiful desktop as much as Mac OS X did – it remained my using it on my 12” Travelmate. Fortunately, a group of peoples out there has done their job to provide a transformation pack named Mac4Lin project. The goal is to make Linux desktop as closer look as OS X did.

Try to reach the package over this link & following the how to steps. In short, perhaps your desktop maybe similar to mine now.



The package complete with Mac theme, desktop background & icons. And it's absolutely suitable for Gnome, except the GDM which isn't changeable yet (even I had tried to tweak it with Ailurus or GDM2Setup for Ubuntu). Anyway, you can set it to auto-login mode so that it wouldn't display GDM login window anymore. Look at snapshot below, the left side of the screen displaying Nautilus (which is similar to Mac file browser) while the right side is Firefox (with extra add-ons & themes, will make much close to Safari browser appearance).



On the bottom of the screen, laid the Avant Window Navigator – A dock similar to Mac desktop. All available in a single package of Mac4Lin transformation pack. All you need to do is follow the instruction, a little yum download & bit of compiling tar balls. After it succeed, I guarantee for your satisfaction. Just try & believe me.

To change Plymouth animation (known as Red Hat Graphical Boot), try to take a look at gnome-look.org or kde-look.org & find one suitable for you. As I've tried, to changed this you need to compiled manually. Please take carefully to do that, once you follow the instruction then your Goddard may be safe.

BURG on Fedora 13
Last but not least is how to modify default GRUB into BURG. Well, a complete hand book I've found on their project website. Like others said that BURG is stand for GRUB, it's a unique name mirrored from GRUB ~ an update model of GRUB bootloader which used high graphic for boot background. I said, this is a revolutionary & pretty cute boot loader than used on Mac or Windows Se7en.

Note that I don't recommended it if you're newbies on Linux since it's totally hand made (manual) but If you dare to do this, than prepare for install all of the dependencies. First, connect to the internet & give below command on terminal:

#sudo yum install autoconf automake bison flex make gcc ruby python gettext-devel freetype-devel

also provide required extra software for the emulated version requires:

#sudo yum install ncurses-devel SDL-devel

To download the source, you need to install bazaar binary package.

#sudo yum install bzr

After it completed, create a folder named burg on your home folder and enter to that folder. While you're on it & for the first time need to downloading the source, from terminal, enter:

#bzr branch lp:burg

Then, let it sync a previously downloaded source tree to the latest version (This still should be run in your burg source directory):

#bzr pull

After each update, you need to regenerate the configuration files by running this command in the same burg source directory:

#./autogen.sh

After that, download themes pack from this link since the original source doesn't include it yet. Those above commands purposed for preparing BURG source code in burg directory on your home folder. Based on the original manual, you should specify BURG compile & install directory. In my experiment, I supply both with different directory, burg_nb for the compilation & burg_install for the target installation. Just follow it & create 2 new directory, then copy all of files from burg directory into burg_nb (except the zipped themes file, we will use it later).

Now enter to burg_nb directory via terminal and get start to compile with commands below:

#$HOME/burg/configure --with-platform=pc --prefix=$HOME/burg_install
#make
#make install

After compilation completed, extract zipped themes pack to folder burg_install. Continuing to create a default configuration file named by burg & save it to $HOME/burg_install/etc/default. Here below is my default burg configuration file:

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true
GRUB_GFXMODE=saved
GRUB_THEME=saved
GRUB_FOLD=saved

Just in case you need a backup, copy burg files to folder /etc/default. Now, tell BURG that you have others OS (eg: Windows) on your machine. To define this, open 40_custom file from $HOME/burg_install/etc/burg.d folder & specify where partition your Windows reside. See my 40_custom modified file below:

#!/bin/sh
exec tail -n +3 $0
# This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the
# menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change
# the 'exec tail' line above.
#

menuentry "Acer Recovery" --class windows --class os {
insmod ntfs
set root='(hd0,1)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 3ab0e580b0e542cd
chainloader +1
}

menuentry "Se7en" --class windows --class os {
insmod ntfs
set root='(hd0,2)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 3ab0e580b0e542cd
chainloader +1
}

As you can see on my example above (first partition contains Acer recovery partition & followed by Windows partition), please make an appropriate to your partition machine. Now, as root, install it to MBR so that it will take effect on the next boot:

#sudo $HOME/burg_install/sbin/burg-install /dev/sda
#sudo $HOME/burg_install/sbin/burg-mkconfig -o /boot/burg/burg.cfg

Then last, copy the extracted themes pack into /boot/burg. To check & re-check, make sure that you have already directory structure like mine below (or repeat from first step if it not the same):



Please note that users directory on picture above is your home directory. If there's no error reported after both commands above resulted, you may safely reboot your machine & get ready to see a changes.



See that, now GRUB has disappear replaced by BURG bootloader interface. To change themes, press “T” keyboard or “F3” to change the screen resolution or you can do some tweaks from configuration files modification (icons or backdround image) by reading the manual. Now, I have my favorite OS on my netbook, but I don't know how long it can stand. As the final words from this current article, I order to Fedora developer to enable GDM setup anymore (like previous GDM version) & add BURG as default bootloader on future release of Fedora. Please, share your own experience on Goddard on below comments box before leaving this blog. Thanks for passing by.

Labels: Acer Aspire One, Acer TravelMate, Fedora, Linux, Mac OSX86, Open Solaris, Ubuntu

It's been a long while I had Open Solaris 2008.11 on my Acer Aspire One ~ it's particularly 2nd generation model AOA150 got from Google with 8.9” screen & 120 GB hard drive. I think it's enough to play through with Open Solaris & need to try to get back to Fedora which I passed it for last 5 major version.

Now, I have Goddard – a codename of Fedora 13 – iso & a brand new Western Digital Passport (an external hard drive with 320 GB capacity) I bought from bhinneka.com. Since I don’t have an external optical drive, I always used USB mass storage to installing OS on my netbook. This time, I'd like to try my external 320 GB hard drive as the iso master installation rather than my 8 GB USB.

At first, I had unboxing the hard drive & let it parted with a free partition kit named by EASEUS Partition Master 6.1.1 Home Edition. After that, I'll have 4 partitions on it. See it on partition table illustration below:



On that table, I'm planning to store out my data into partition #2, #3 & #4 – so we can ignore it from now. Let focus on first red partition table (10 GB) which I prepared for Fedora 13 iso with FAT32 partition type. Like usual, I also use Fedora LiveUSB Creator to make USB flash disk boot-able. I thought that it would be succeed either on USB external hard drive but it wasn't!



On picture above, none of drive letters shows up on Target Device combo. Why was that happened? Explained on a FAQ WIKI pages, that Windows sometime detects certain drives as NOT being removable devices – perhaps a different device class between USB Mass Storage & USB Removable Drive. But with a clue on that, that kit can force the 1st mode. Don't run it from double click icon, just open up a DOS command prompt on active directory where that software placed & type:

liveusb-creator.exe --force X:

where X refer to your drive letter on your external hard drive. Look at the picture below, i used G: as the target partition. Hit enter on the prompt window & vice versa... the Fedora LiveUSB Creator now shows the G: drive letter.



As soon as this way succeed, i then continue to the rest of process which was #1) burning iso to the external drive (X:)



#2) copying also the iso to X: #3) and last, stand by for the first reboot to boot to the external drive from BIOS. Once it booted smoothly, you ain't have no trouble for more. Just follow the on screen wizard to complete your Fedora 13 a.k.a Goddard installation or you can found the manual documentation elsewhere over the internet. I'll be back for the next part of Goddard; the complete Mac OS X Gnome themes until change GRUB into BURG boot loader. Stay tune on this channel...

Labels: Acer Aspire One, Acer TravelMate, Fedora, Linux, Mac OSX86, Open Solaris, Ubuntu