For those of you who want to run OSX in a virtual machine, its not terribly difficult to setup if you’ve got the right instructions.  If not, it takes a lot of experimenting and guess work to get it working properly.  I tried to do it myself with limited success.  I could get it to install 100% of the time but only once did I ever get it to reboot into the main OS.  I wiped it out (thinking I had it down) so that I could try and fix  the booting.  I never got it to work on my own again after that.

I was fortunate to find a tutorial that worked perfectly for me the first time.  I was then able to upgrade to OS 10.5.7 so that I could install the iPhone 3.0 SDK.  Now when there’s a slow day at work I can develop for my phone without having to bring in my personal computer! Woot!  The link to the tutorial is below. I’ll copy and paste its contents as well in the event that it ever goes down.  My best advice to you is take VM snapshots along the way as you get individual portions working.  Also note that you cannot boot the VM without the installation DVD mounted.  If you forget to install osx86 tools, you can download it here.

Link to a direct download of the 10.5.7 update from Apple itself.  Here are the upgrade instructions I followed.

VMWare configuration instructions courtesy of Bob’s Mental Moshpit.  Thanks Bob.  Note that this installs “Darwin-64.” You do not need to be running a 64-bit OS for this.  It’s working just fine for me on Windows XP 32 Bit.

Installing Mac OS X 10.5.6 under VMware 6.5.2

One of the current “Holy Grails” of virtual machinery is getting a functional installation of Mac OS X into a VMware virtual machine.   There’s a lot of Google talk out there about how to do it, but not everybody seems to be successful.  I certainly wasn’t for quiet some time.  However, I sat down today and decided to give it my best shot again, and this time I succeeded!  Not only did I succeed with iDeneb 1.4 (which installs Mac OS X 10.5.6), I successfully upgraded that release to 10.5.7.  Cool. 

I’m documenting here the steps I followed (many times, just to make sure they worked for me) to achieve a successful Mac OS X 10.5.x install in a VMware Workstation 6.5.2 machine.  There is no sound, but there is networking, which is far more important to me.  If you find a way to get audio working, you might post it here.

Be aware that these steps worked for me, but YMMV.  If you are not successful using them, there’s not much I can do to help you out.  I had to experiment over and over to find these working steps; you will probably have to do the same to overcome your problems.  For the purposes of this tutorial, I’ll be using the file “iDeneb_v1.4_10.5.6.iso”.

Here We Go

1. First, of course, you need to grab the iDeneb 1.4 distribution (Mac OS X 10.5.6).  Google it, or use your favorite torrent search engine.
2. Mount the iDeneb ISO as a drive (using something like UltraISO or Virtual CloneDrive).  Note the drive letter of the DVD.
3. Create a new virtual machine in VMware.  The following sequence of screen grabs should show you all the settings you need to create for the new environment:

	Tell VMware that you will install the operating system later:
	For operating system type, Select “Other”, and then “FreeBSD 64-bit”:
	I named it “10.5″ because I will upgrade from the 10.5.6 on the iDeneb 1.4 image to 10.5.7. You can call it whatever you like, of course:
	Choose the number of processors to let the OS use:
	Allocate an amount of memory to use:
	Unless you know what you’re doing, select “Bridged networking”:
	Drive-type settings:
	Set the space available on the disc. The installation will consume 6-7GB, and the update will consume even more. If you need to do more on the drive, increase that size here:
	Don’t power on the machine yet:

4. Edit the machine settings, and set the CD/DVD drive to use the one that you noted earlier where the iDeneb 1.4 image is mounted:

5. Power on the machine. You’ll want to be sure you click in the window immediately so it captures the mouse/keyboard focus. When prompted to press “F8″ for startup options, press it. Then, at the “boot:” prompt, you can enter options you want for starting the installer. I use the following (’-v’ means show diagnostic messages; I recommend entering at least that):

6. Now, if you’re lucky, at this point you should boot into the iDeneb installer. When you get to the installation prompt, you’ll want to go to the “Utilities” menu, and launch “Disk Utility”. From this interface, select the VM disc, and then select the “Partition” tab:

7. Create a single-partition layout, leaving the volume type as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”. This volume type is important: I was unable to get the VM to boot with any other type:

8. Select the “Options” button, and change the disc to use a “Master Boot Record” partition. The other types failed to work for me:

9. “Apply” your partition settings, and exit the “Disk Utility”.
10. Proceed with the installation, selecting your VM disc as the target partition (it will be the only one, if you followed these instructions).
11. When the installation completes, you’ll be prompted to restart. Do so, but when the machine gets back to the boot prompt, “Stop” it immediately (don’t worry, this won’t harm anything) so that you are back to the VMware desktop and the VM is powered off.
12. Change the “CD/DVD” settings of the VM from the specific iDeneb drive back to “Auto”. DO NOT UNMOUNT THE DVD. You’ll want to leave the iDeneb DVD mounted in the operating system, because it seems to be the only way to allow the VM to actually boot correctly.
13. Shut down VMware.
14. Open the .vmx file of the new iDeneb machine (e.g., “Mac OS X 10.5.vmx”), and find the line that starts with “guestOS”. It should contain the entry “freebsd-64″. Change this to “darwin-64″, and save the file.
15. Re-start VMware, and power on the Mac OS X VM. Let the boot screen time out, and if the gods are smiling down upon you, you will boot into Mac OS X 10.5.6.

Post-installation Booting

Of course, things did not go this smoothly for me.  It took me a couple of boot attempts to get the operating system to come up (boot-hang-kill-repeat).  When it did, I did all the set up stuff, and it took me into the OS X desktop. Once I get everything set up that is boot dependent (like updates and screen resolution), I plan to simply suspend the VM so that I can unmount the iDeneb DVD, and then simply power on the VM whenever I need it.

Screen Resolution

There are two ways to control the screen resolution.  You can enter it at the boot prompt (see the previous image), but this is cumbersome, and can typically lead to a failed boot.  Or, you can change the com.apple.Boot.plist file to make the resolution permament (my preferred approach).  Both approaches require a boot up sequence in order to be successful.  You can read about implementing both approaches here.

Good Luck

If you’ve been looking for a successful way to create a portable Macintosh, I hope this approach works for you. Being a software engineer, it’s really fantastic to be able to carry Linux, Mac OS X, and Vista along with me on a single machine when I’m away from home.

iHackintosh Upgrade instructions:

• Download AppleDecrypt.kext  Click HERE.
• Download IntelCPUPMDisabler.kext  Click HERE.
• Edit : AppleIntelCPUPM Disabler.kexts will be in /Extra

Open the terminal & perform following command’s without quotes.

”sudo –s”

*type password*

”while sleep 1;”

”do rm –rf /System/Library/Extensions/AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement.kext;done”

Open 10.5.7 Update Installer.

Run update BUT DO NOT RESTART.

Go back to your terminal and press Control C to end the script.

In terminal type:

”vi /System/InstallAtStartup/scripts/1”

Replace the line Dont Steal Mac OS X.kext with dsmos.kext if any exists.

Don’t restart.

Open osx86tools  >>> Check repair permissions >>> Set kext permissions >>> Clear extensions cache >>> Restart.

Boot using -v to see if any errors.

So the world is moving from SD television to HD television.  There are now several different video formats available to broadcasters incuding 480p 720p and 1080i.  Many people wanted to move away from interlaced video completely and only support progressive scan video. But, our government, in its infinite wisdom, standardized everything at 1080i.  I don’t understand that at all.  Interlaced video creates all sorts of interesting challenges, espcially in the era of digital content.

I have a problem at work right now that is specific to interlaced video that I cannot figure out how to overcome.  My problem is that I need to draw basic primitives to the overlay channel.  These primitives aren’t supposed to obstruct or detract from the video but are generated based on user defined areas and the video’s content.   These overlays have to be drawn on coax (via NTSC/PAL), or a S/VGA display.

The VGA output is non-interlaced while the coax is interlaced.  What this means is that my primitives look absolutely beautiful on VGA but have a very annoying flicker over coax.  For those of you unfamiliar with interlaced versus non-interlaced video it is because a VGA monitor draws the entire screen every time it paints.  A video monitor (TV, etc) is interlaced and draws every other line and then goes back and draws the lines that it skipped the first time.  These two different draw periods are referred to as fields.

This means that if you had a horizontal line that was one pixel wide, it would be drawn in  one field and not drawn at all in the next field.  This causes the line to disappear, only to be drawn again.  That is where the flicker comes in.  Just doubling the thickness of the line would likely result in having two lines flickerin on and off right next to each other.

Well, I don’t have a problem with my horizontal lines, but I do with diagonal lines.   What I am doing is this.  If I am going to turn on pixel (x,y) then I would also turn on (x,y+1).  I’d then paint pixels (x,y+2), (x,y+3), (x,y-1) and (x,y-2) with the gradient color.  That way every field will have one pixel for the line and one pixel on each side of the line for the gradient color.  That combined with the persistence of the phosphors in the previous field should blur everything to the eye and make it look more consistent.  At least, that is what I would think.

I’m still getting flicker, however.  Not only am I getting flicker, but it also seems to be worse on lines where the slope is greater than 1.

I’m absolutely perplexed by this and I can’t figure out how to resolve my flickering issue.  I’ve tried to decrease the intensity of the colors that I am using by half and that makes the flicker less noticable but does not remove it completely.

I’m completely stumped.  I’m going to go talk to one of our senior hardware engineers to see if he has any idea.  He knows analog video very well.  If he has any thoughts, I’ll be sure to share them.  Otherwise, please give me any thoughts you have.

I always forget how to chain xargs w/ sed. I use it so rarely that I always have to look it up again. Here its an example for future reference. Note that the command is `sed -i single quote single quote` not a double quote.

find . -name Makefile | xargs sed -i ” -e ’s/–parents/-p/’

So we shipped a whole bunch of products out into the field that use LSI raid cards.  The controller cards have cache on them, as do the drives.  The drive cache was left on and it ended up causing a bunch of headaches for us in the field.  Obviously it is bad to cache on both the hard drive and the controller.  If the drive loses power before it writes its cache to disk, the controller will think everything is ok when, in fact, the cached data was never written out.  It has caused drives to fail in the field and sometimes arrays do not rebuild when a drive is replaced.

So, since I did the hardware abstraction layer, which interacts with the LSI cards through their “megalib” library, I was tasked with writing an application that would disable the drive cache on all of the hard drives.  The drives in question are SATA drives, but the LSI card makes them appear as SCSI devices to Linux.

In order to disable the cache, I have to send a command directly to the drives using a pass through function in the controller cards.  After finding some good resources on SCSI commands, I found it wasn’t actually a difficult task.  But the LSI Library’s pass through is somewhat confusing to me and not very well documented.  You pass in a CDB structure (command descriptor block) that tells the drive what you want it to do (in this case modify the drive cache settings). 

The problem being that I need to modify just one bit of an entire byte.  So I have to know the value of the rest of that byte.  So I sent in a command to read the drive information.  Using the serial output on the LSI card, I can see that it is reading the HDD configuration, but I see no change in the output with write cache enabled and disabled.

The pass through function provided by LSI requires you pass in a CDB which also has a pointer to memory used for input or output (depending on the command you send).  When I try to just set the first three bytes (which are all I should need to modify the drive cache), it fails. 

So, not only does it not seem to be reading the data properly, but it doesn’t seem to write it either.  Most likely, I’m doing something wrong.  But the fact that there is no satisfactory documentation, and that I have to wait to hear from one of their developers, kind of irritates me.

But, I cannot say a whole lot here because the code my work puts out almost completely lacks documentation.  I’ve written general classes to do some basic things only to be told by someone later that we already had a class written to perform that task.  Of course, I couldn’t have possibly known that unless I delved through our source.  The problem being that we have millions of lines of code!

Edit: I forgot, I was going to put some links to some great resources that I found.
This one from answers.com talks about all the different commands you might want to issue to a SCSI device.
Here is one from Apple that shows where the WCE (write cache enable) bit is changed.

Ok, here I am putting in a shameless plug for a friend of mine.  He wrote a time clock or time sheet program for windows.  You can find it here.

Alright, I’m not just putting it here as a shameless plug.  I think it is pretty cool.  He spent a lot of time and effort developing it in his free time.  What I find so remarkable about it is that he wrote it using pascal.  I thought it was an interesting choice.  I don’t know anything about pascal, to speak of.  I didn’t even have a class on it at school.  I’m not at all remotely interested in it as a language.  Granted that Delphi is still supposed to be pretty popular.  There are sites devoted to it.  But this friend of mine hasn’t had to do pascal programming at work for years.

If I had a lot of viewers, I’d probably get flamed for being so marvelled by the use of pascal.  But I guess it’s just a change in the wind, all programming languages tend to get phased out.  It’s sink or swim in this world.  I’ll likely have to learn some languages that I had never dreamed of some day.