Luke Sheldrick’s Blog

Last week when I was at a festival, my macbook unfortunately ran totally out of space, and there wasn’t much I could delete. With almost 20 gigs of SD cards, the only thing that could really take the chop was my XP boot camp partition.

Cut a long story short, I’ve now got a much bigger drive (500 GB) for my macbook. Along with the release of Windows 7 RC1 being released I thought I’d give it a try with boot camp.

Installing is pretty easy, burn the Microsoft ISO to a DVD, and follow the normal guide. I detest the fact that I need to burn another CD, or use my OS X Install DVD (which I can never find) to get the boot camp drivers. If like me you’d like to download them, I’ve given a link below to where you may find them. I just put them on a usb stick.

Once installed, pretty much everything works under boot camp, the only thing I found that didn’t play was the ‘Reboot into OS X’ I get an error. This isn’t a huge problem, as you can just hold the alt key on boot up to select OS X or Windows.

Once I got all that working, I then wanted to get the same build / partition under VMware fusion. Reading a few guides, the best way is to follow the normal guide for XP, but change it so the guest is set to Windows 2008 Server. Again, all working pretty well once you install VMware Tools.

The only problem that I did have, is there was no networking for the guest. The NIC just showed as Ethernet Controller. Nothing seemed to get this NIC working, tried manually installing the drivers from the VMWare tools cd, copying from another Windows 7 guest.

The only thing that seemed to fix it, was to shutdown the guest, and add a second NIC, and boot back up. Windows 7 RC1, installs this NIC with no problems at all, and all is working. Intererstingly, it still wont play with the original one. None the less, it’s all working through it’s second, new NIC, so I am happy with that.

Useful links

• Windows 7 RC1
• Guide to installing in boot camp
• Guide to installing in VMWare Fusion
• Downloadable boot camp drivers

A friend told me of a magical cross platform application, which I’ve been using for a while, thought I’d share. Synergy;

“Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It’s intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). ”

The picture above shows my very small desk, sporting 2x 22 Samsungs, and my Dell D420. Under the desk is an old HP desktop powering the two monitors (and soon to be 9′ touch screen above them, when I get the drivers setup). I rarely use the D420 these days, as I use my MacBook or Advent 4213 notebook when out and about, so didn’t mind giving it up to the desk.

I can use the keyboard and mouse on the laptop, to control both it, and the bigger screens. The neat thing is, with the config setup correctly, I can just move the mouse upwards and the pointer magically moves to the other screen, and the keyboard then controls that computer too. A few other neat options are to have a shared clipboard, and to activate the screensaver/lock screen across all computers with each other.

So on my tiny desk, I can fit in quite a lot of screen real estate. As for using the laptop as a primary keyboard, I started to do this at work when the hotdesk keyboards started to freak me out, and using the laptop keyboard is actually quite nice to use.

Have tested Synergy with os x, and all worked pretty flawlessly there too. Not had a chance to test under windows just yet, as rarely use it these days, but from what I’ve read it all works fine.

I must say I am a bit of a technology fan boy, and loooooove most things electrical, especially if they come under the gadget category.

However I am constantly in two minds when it comes to the argument over apple, I have an iPhone, and a Macbook, which when I sit down and use think they’re brillient, and how could I dream of using anything else..

Until I go back to a non apple product, say my HTC TyTN. I was rummanging through my bag a minute ago and remembered I had it in there, and GPRS was driving me nuts on my iPhone, EDGE hardly ever seems to work. As I am using it however I remembered how nice it is to have full keyboard, and push mail…etc

Then I have my Dell D420, running the new FC9, which I’ve luckily got the inbuilt 3G modem working now. Another thing I love, I can be anywherèopen my tiny laptop, and have the net, no messing with dongles, bluetooth or anything like that…

But then I’ll go back to my mac and blissully forget all that.

Never seems to happen with Windows these days though, to think I used to detest *nix.

My question is, will I ever be satisified? And also where is the bacon roll shop?

_________________
Luke Sheldrick
e: luke@sheldrick.co.uk

sent from my mobile device

Connecting Exchange 2007 and Entourage 2008

Well I have sat for hours trying to get my Entourage  2008 to talk to my new Exchange 2007 server.

So after buying my copy of leapard, tonight I got around to upgrading from 10.4 to 10.5 on the laptop.

After a blue screen hitch, that was fixed by a quick google, and consult with Mr Hardy, all was sorted.

Must say I am pretty impressed with the new OS by Mac. I’ve just sat and watch Pirates of the Caribbean, and still have 2:14 left on the battery, considerably more than I was getting before. w00t.

Will have to wait and see how much I get on with it, at the moment, the only bug bear is that I can’t use InsomniaX that kept my MacBook from going to sleep when I shut the lid. Hopefully they’ll sort that out soon enough.