The Wahyudiharto's Blog

For those who desired to updating Java plugin (the runtime environment) to their Mac OS, here's a short how-to's guide. Java on OSX is available only from Apple it self by self-patch-package & not provided by Sun like others supported OS.

First, make sure that your OSX is virgin from JRE. Check it out from your favorite browser (Safari or Firefox) by loading an applet sample page (eg: from this link). If your browser displaying an unsupported plugin just like picture below, then it's the sign that your OSX still not Java ready yet.



If you guess that it may resolve from auto-search plugin window (for example from Firefox browser), then certainly that Firefox couldn't find it best suitable.



If you guess that it may resolve from Sun website, then you may find an answer that the JRE's only available from Software Update feature.



If you guess that Software Update feature will find you this lost JRE, then you probably find nothing up there.

So, where the hell is this JRE package? In a middle of annoyed situation, a knowledge base website from Apple has an important update information regarding to this case (http://support.apple.com/kb/DL848).



Finally, the patch package has founded. Download it & make an install like usual package. Note that you need to close your active browser before running the patch!



After the installation completed, try to open browser & execute your applet sample.



Like image above, so the case is closed now :)

Labels: Apple, Java, Mac OSX86

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

4 days full of patient downloading 4.4GB Mac OS X image from my office was not too worthless. Suddenly, I got interested in Mac after seeing from a site on internet how beautiful is their Mac desktop installed in x86 Intel machine. For somehow, my curiosity was shows up on that time. After 2 tired sick days trying to install & re-install, now I feel totally satisfied having triple boot system between Windows XP, Fedora 7 & Mac OS X in my Acer laptop.

As like usual, the very first action to do before installing an OS is preparing the partition storage. For this requirement, I tried to provide 10GB of new blank partition I made successfully after resizing partition from Linux Fedora 7. I then formatted this logical partition with FAT32 type since I don’t have any idea what the OS X will fits, either the partition tool seems not support to create the Mac journalized file system format (HFS+ or 0xaf).

Installing this such OS was very simple & quick. No frequent question window displayed like any other OS installation session & total time needed to starting installation was less than 30 minutes. After it first boot, Mac get started on it’s way replacing the grub boot menu from Fedora 7 & begun to showing it very artistic desktop. But wait… how the hell I can get switch back log on to Windows or Linux? Okay, I’ll think of it later. Now, it’s the time to taste my fresh Mac OS X sensation.



On my laptop, the display adapter was correctly installed & shows high quality WXGA 1280x800 resolution. The boot time to get the desktop was also quite fast. It was surprised me. Anyway, some hardware devices were not recognized successfully such as the web cam, MMC reader & even the sound card. It most worst than Linux, I thought. But, it’s fine for me for now.



Let’s take a look at about form you can find on left side of Finder menu bar. This Intel OS X86 required a specific processor to work. It needs at least SSE2 or SSE3 capable instruction set such as Intel Core 2 Duo.



The control panel window known as System Preferences are located on the dock. Some of tweaks can be done from here.



This is my partition table displayed from the same command as Linux has in a terminal.



Got tried OpenOffice 2.2 over Mac after downloading 133MB from internet. It’s an alternative cheapest office productivity solution.



The Mac start menu, very unique than any other common OS.



Widget are one of my favorite desktop session. It’s fancy appearance shows with F12 keyboard shortcut.



Also had VirtualBox for Mac & tried to run a Windows XP image. Quite interested but without any network interface enabled.



One for sure, this Mac was equipped with Apache web server installation. You have to download php module & also MySQL for Mac to enabled the MAMP (Mac Apache Mysql PHP) integration.



Only Bluetooth wireless networking technology has been recognized & working fine. I have been tested it for pairing into another device such as PDA.



Enough for my short review about insides the OSX sensation. Now, the odd questions are back. How the hell I can get switch to boot Windows or Linux or Mac? Actually, my existing Mac installation was located on 3rd partition on logical partition. This situation are bad based on osx86 online documentation. It was impossible to repair Fedora 7 boot grub menu automatically since grub doesn’t recognized the 0xaf type partition & won’t attach it normally. So, here is my first trial & error with /boot/grub/grub.conf files sampled by forum over the internet:

default=2
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,7)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu

title MacOS X (Tiger)
root (hd0,7)
chainloader –force +1

title Fedora 7
root (hd0,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7 ro root=LABEL=/ quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7.img

title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

Save the changes, re-run the below command before reboot the system:

grub-install /dev/sda

The grub boot menu was back. Select the first menu, but it won’t boot. So, I tried to change into 2nd alternative boot choice. Tried to boot with NTLDR XP boot loader. For this experience, I did exactly what others forum told me. Copying chain0 file got from Mac DVD root & adding a new line in c:\boot.ini:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
c:\chain0=”Mac OS X”

Save the changes & restart. After it shows XP boot loader menu, Mac boot choice still won’t boot. I was so confused until these steps. It seems that they were right. The 3rd testing session was based on Linux boot loader again, but with chain0 file copied under /boot/grub folder. Make a change on grub.conf so that it pointed to chain0 file to boot:

…
title MacOS X (Tiger)
root (hd0,7)
chainloader /boot/grub/chain0
…

Still failed with error booter message displayed. Finally, based on my own trial, I then copied all the 9 files (4.34MB) from root DVD installer into /boot/grub/i386.



Make changes to grub.conf liki below:

default=2
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,7)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu

title MacOS X (Tiger)
rootnoverify (hd0,7)
chainloader /boot/grub/i386/boot0

title Fedora 7
root (hd0,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7 ro root=LABEL=/ quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7.img

title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

Save & reboot. Vice versa!... the MacOS X from grub boot menu are now work to boot the OSX with boot0 file chainloader & booting from logical partition. Any comment are open since I’m a Mac newbie.

Labels: Apple, Mac OSX86