phaq

Why for God’s sake would anyone even think about shutting speakers while the screen saver runs?
Don’t these thingies provide an internal mute switch to stay quiet?

Well, yes, most of the time, they do. Though in my case, I run that nice and decent System47 LCARS-style screen saver. And while it provides indeed a mute switch, it yet refuses to honor that flag and will always revert to non-muted operations. This drives me crazy, at least during the night time.

So here’s my solution to shut it quiet — really handy when I’m not along and forgot to turn volume down …
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Some time ago, I set up a multi-boot environment on my Mac, where I could use my BootCamp-Partition for both booting Windows natively on the Mac as well as virtualized from within VirtualBox.

Now, I wanted to create a clone of the RAW partition to do some testing.
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So OS X “Lion” is out now for over 36 hours. It’s time for a review of the minor troubles and glitches I had with it so far.
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Mac OS X (since 10.5) sports a python environment in it’s default install, which includes a very simple HTTP server.
This may come in handy if you want to serve some files quickly over HTTP, without the need to fireup the full-blown Apache available through ‘Web Sharing Service’.
Don’t believe me? Read on to see how you’ll be up in running in just a few seconds.
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Here’s a follow-up to my previous posts on sharing Windows 7 in BootCamp and VirtualBox and launching a VirtualBox VM directly through an icon shortcut.

Concerning this topic I was asked if it’s possible to have the BootCamp partition only umounted upon startup of the Windows VM.
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Yes, I know, OS X has already a “print to pdf” feature. This does however not work for those applications which don’t use the OS X native printing dialog, e.g. some Java apps.

This is where CUPS-PDF kicks in. It adds a virtual printer to the system, thus enabling non-native applications to print to a PDF as well.

Mission accomplished!

So I work on OS X for a few years now, but until today that I didn’t really care about the underlying HFS+ file system.
But while working on a project using SVN, I got this unexpected error message:


gianpaolo-del-mattos-macbook-pro:trunk Gianpaolo$ svn update
svn: URL 'svn+ssh://...../webinterface/files/lib/webmin' of existing directory '...../webinterface/files/lib/Webmin' does not match expected URL 'svn+ssh://..../webinterface/files/lib/Webmin'

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Why should I dare to launch the VirtualBox GUI each and every time when I in fact only want to start a particular VM?
So my intent is to create an icon in the OS X dock which allows me to start my Windows VM directly with one single click.
Not to say that I’m a lazy person, but I dare to get around the GUI for such a simple and straight forward task 😉

Luckily VirtualBox provides us with everything needed to accomplish this through the “VBoxManage” command.
The rest is just some (not so really) magic OS X trickery, as you’ll find out shortly.
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So you finally own one of these newly released Apple MacBook Pro with fancy Core i7 Quad-Core CPU?
Then you fire up your VirtualBox VM and are disappointed about the sloppy performance?

Luckily, it’s only a (hopefully short-lived) compatility issue. While this will surely need a final fix, here’s a temporary workaround…
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I always used to have Windows installed through Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro. The reason for it being simple: I need it for some games 😉
On the other hand, I use OS X for my primary work, but again, sometimes there’s no way around Windows. So I had the same Windows installed again within VirtualBox.

Well, what a waste of valuable disk space. So, after I got my new MacBook Pro, equipped with an SSD, I decided to go for it and share the Boot Camp partition between Windows 7 running natively and VirtualBox.
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