Mac on my PC – LEO4ALL

By Josh Highland in hacks, hardware, internet, iPhone, iPod, Josh's Rambling, mac, semi-legal, software, tutorials

In my last blog post I talked about how my computer had a system drive failure. I am waiting for Western Digital to send me a new 10,000 rpm drive to replace the broken one, so in the meantime, I thought I would screw around with trying to put Mac OS X on my desktop.

My friend Luis Majano is a great software developer and swears by his Mac Book Pro. At work I run Windows XP, at home it Windows Vista. I have Ubuntu on my laptop and run CentOS on my web servers, so I’m not a die hard about one OS or another, they all have their place.

I love Linux operating systems, so learning from Luis that Mac OS X sits on top of BSD made me more interested in switching (Apple don’t tell you that in their cute commercials). The price of Mac computers is insane though, and not something I’m blindly going to jump into.

So to the point… a broken PC a spare harddrive, and the want to try Mac OS X, whats a geek to do? A few google searches, and a torrent download later, I had in hand, Leo4All.

Leo4All is an awesome distribution of the hacked apple OS to run on none genuine apple hardware. They even have a great wiki (http://osx86leo4all.wikidot.com)

I dropped the DVD into my drive, booted up and a few minutes later I was in the OS X installer. Formatted the drive into an apple format, clicked install and 10 minutes later I was working inside of OS X! everything was there, even time machine! check out the screen shot below…

I had trouble with my network card, as OS X doesnt seem to like a lot of on-mother-board devices. I fixed that by powering down, and installing an old pci NIC. Booted back up and it was there!

I had no audio, but after a few minutes of googeling around, and following likes from the Leo4All wiki, I had it going.

I still havent had any luck getting my dual monitors to work. OS X doesnt seem to like nVidia cards with 512 megs of ram. Oh well, one monitor is fine with me for now.

The USB ports work, and recognize my iPod and iPhone just fine.

So it looks like I’m set. If the experience goes well, who knows, I just might become a switcher! If you know of some sweet mac software I need to try out, let me know.

The Windows tools that I use

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling, software, windows

windows_tools.jpg

I am not a huge fan of windows, but it the operating system I have been running for the past 14 years (if you dont count college, or my current laptop… both were/are linux based). I have Windows Vista at home, and I have to use Windows XP at work.

Over the years, I have found programs that have worked for me. They have worked well, and helped me to get things done. I decided to make a list of the applications that I use on a rather regular basis. These are the things that I would for sure reinstall if my computer was to die tonight. Most of the software is free, and open source. As a result, many of the programs I am about to list also are available for Linux and Apple OSX. So here is the list of windows program that I love, in no particular order (expect Firefox, its at the top of the list)

Web Browsing:

File Searching:

File Comparison:

Text Editor:

Sound Editing:

Windows Enhancements:

Instant Messaging:

CD Burning:

Anti-virus:

Spyware:

Image sharing/hosting:

VOIP:

P2P:

Backup:

  • carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com)
    $50 a year for unlimited off site backup? you better believe i use this. you should also!

Blogging:

Programming:

SSH:

RSS Reader:

FTP:

Key Logging:

StarCraft in Ubuntu? YES, Drink the WINE!

By Josh Highland in hacks, linux, software, tutorials

ubuntu_starcraft.jpg

In keeping in step with my new found love of StarCraft, I wanted to play it on my laptop. One problem… my laptop doesn’t run on windows or mac, its powered by UBUNTU!

I love running Ubuntu, and I have never found a reason why I would need windows on my laptop. Ubuntu does everything I need it to, that is until I wanted to play a PC based game on it.

I did a little google searching and I found out that WINE on Ubuntu will play StarCraft perfectly! I gave it a go, and was surprised at how easy it was, and how well it all worked together.

Here are the steps I took:

  • Open a terminal and run sudo apt-get install wine to get wine.
  • After that finishes, insert the StarCraft CD into the computer
  • In the terminal cd to whatever cdrom drive you put the cd in (under the /media/ directory). Mine was /media/cdrom0
  • Use Wine to setup StarCraft with wine setup.exe. You’ll get the install screen for SC – enter your CD key and install the software. StarCraft will be installed under the path of
    ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Starcraft/starcraft.exe.
  • In the terminal, run winecfg and go to the Audio tab. Set Hardware Acceleration to Emulation.
  • What is StarcCaft without the Broodwar expantion? I eject the Starcraft CD and insert the Broodwar expantion CD.
    cd to the appropriate /media/ directory and run wine setup.exe.
  • To play StarCraft, run wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Starcraft/starcraft.exe.
    I was also able to find a link to it from the Applications menu in Ubuntu.
  • Lastly, I downloaded the latest patch to BroodWar from blizzard.com, and ran that with no problem.

There it was, a fully patched and running copy of StarCraft on my Ubuntu laptop. Can life get sweeter? I submit that it can not!

My Blog, 2007 in review

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling

2007 is gone and dead, but I took a few moments and went back to check out that I blogged about during last year. Here are some of the highlights.

/bin/rm: Argument list too long

By Josh Highland in linux, tutorials

I’m cleaning up my linux web server (the very one that powers this site), and I needed to delete some things that had been accumulation (spam mails). When say mean some, i mean over 100,000 files! I’m not a Linux whiz, but I can manage pretty well.

I tried to remove the files using “rm *”, only to get back “/bin/rm: Argument list too long”
my initial reaction was: wft? Arguments to long?! gtfo!

It took a bit to figure out, but I came up with a solution:

if you try:
rm *

and you get this:
/bin/rm: Argument list too long

do this instead:
find . -name "*" -print | xargs rm

The files are gone, and I am happy once again.