I really wanted some custom icons for those VMs. My solution, (as usual) when it doesn’t exist make it. So, I opened pvs.icns (contained in the Parallels Desktop.app bundle /Applications/Parallels Desktop.app/Contents/Resources/pvs.icns) in Icon Composer.app, selected the 512 x 512 version and copied it to the clipboard. I then pasted that into a new Photoshop document and began editing. I saved each new version as a 512 x 512 pixel png and then dropped them in img2icns.app which converted them to the icns files I needed to customize my VM launchers.

Behold the glory:

They aren’t perfect, especially the Windows Server 2008, but they are different enough that it is easy to select the right VM in a heartbeat.

You can download the icns files from http://www.evardsson.com/files/parallels_icons.zip

svn, version 1.4.4 (r25188)
compiled Sep 23 2007, 22:32:34

Copyright (C) 2000-2006 CollabNet.
Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/
This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).

Strange, I should have seen the new 1.5.4 there. So I did a bit of digging. Everything I saw about the openCollabNet binary said it installed in /usr/local/bin, but when I ran which svn I saw /usr/bin/svn. So I looked in /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin. Sure enough, two installs in two different places. Not being one to do anything rash (like deleting svn from /usr/bin and then changing the path on all my tools that rely on it) I decided the best thing to do was fix it in a way that was reversible. So, I fired off a sudo ls (to get my password in scope in the shell) and then a simple

for i in `ls /usr/bin/svn*`; do mv /usr/bin/$i /usr/bin/$i.old && ln -sf /usr/local/bin/$i /usr/bin/$i; done

Once I had fired off that command another call to svn –version revealed the fix:

svn, version 1.5.4 (r33841)
compiled Oct 27 2008, 11:19:10

Copyright (C) 2000-2008 CollabNet.
Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/
This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).

I am still a little confused as to how 1.4.4 ended up in /usr/bin while 1.5.4 went to /usr/local/bin (where it is expected to go from the openCollabNet binary installer). I wondered, did I change the install path at some point in the install? Somehow I doubt it, as that is not a change I would be likely to make. Just another little mystery for the unsolved cases file.

I was not, however, able to use it at all. First, my current setup. I am running OS X 10.5 on a 17″ MBP with 4GB RAM. (I have the older mobo however, and the system only actually uses 3GB.) I also have Parallels 3.0 installed with a Windows XP VM (this is important) and two Linux VMs (a Gentoo server and an Ubuntu desktop).

When attempting to start Minefield on OS X (Parallels not running), as Minefield starts Parallels attempts to start an installer on Win XP. The VM cannot be shut down until Minefield is shut down and the only way to do that is via Force Quit. Otherwise the installer continues to attempt to run on Win XP in Parallels. I did not download the Windows installer, nor did I wish to, however, there is something that is triggering a “Firefox Installer” on Win XP whenever Minefield attempts to open on OS X.

Needless to say, while Minefield will not start until it has finished “installing” on XP, and since it is trying (I guess) to install the OS X version on XP, I end up with a hung Minefield and an endless loop of Windows error messages (“The application Firefox Installer has performed and illegal operation etc etc”) followed by the “Firefox Installer” on Windows dying and respawning. Maybe I’ll try again in a week or two, since these are trunk builds and fixes and updates are coming in pretty regularly at this point.

I also found that the Drafts folder didn’t exactly disappear, it just doesn’t show up when there are no drafts saved.

While GPGMail for 10.5 still incorrectly reports signatures as not being valid, it is still in beta and sure to improve. So, I guess the week of trying it on has begun.

Technorati Tags: Mail.app, OS X

If I can get Mail.app to properly map the Drafts and Junk folders again I will likely try it on for a full week or two and see how I feel about it. If I can’t get it over that hurdle, however, forget it.

Technorati Tags: Thunderbird, Mail.app, OS X

Technorati Tags: OS X, Leopard, Parallels

Since I do a great deal of development again MySQL I needed to install that as well, and figured that I would probably need the GD functionality as well so I grabbed libjpeg and libpng to make those work as well. This is the step-by-step.

(Props to James Pelow and his article from last year, from which I borrowed the configure command lines and configuration modifications, as well as the idea of installing the whole mess in /apache2.)

Download the latest MySQL (I used the package version) from MySQL.

Installation is straightforward following the same methods as any other Mac installer.

Download and install libjpeg and libpng – from Ethan Tira-Thompson (this is also in a Mac installer which contains both libraries in one installer).

Download the latest Apache httpd server (Unix source) from Apache

in the terminal:

tar -xzvf httpd-2.2.6.tar.gz && cd httpd-2.2.6

./configure

--prefix=/apache2

--enable-module=most

--enable-shared=max

make

sudo make install

sudo mkdir /apache2/php

Download the latest PHP from PHP

tar -xzvf php-5.2.4.tar.gz && cd php-5.2.4

./configure

--prefix=/apache2/php

--with-zlib

--with-xml

--with-ldap=/usr

--enable-cli

--with-zlib-dir=/usr

--enable-exif

--enable-ftp

--enable-mbstring

--enable-mbregex

--enable-dbx

--enable-sockets

--with-iodbc=/usr

--with-curl=/usr

--with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql

--with-gd

--with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local

--with-png-dir=/usr/local

--with-apxs2=/apache2/bin/apxsmake

sudo make install

sudo cp php.ini-dist /apache2/php/lib/php.ini

Now to make your Apache2.2 a little more ‘Mac’ – you can point it at the Mac web shared files folder, change the user and group and change the location for user files to match the Mac folder system.

Edit httpd.conf (I use nano, you can use any flat text editor like nano, pico, vi, emacs or even BBedit)

sudo nano -w /apache2/conf/httpd.conf

The changes to httpd.conf I made:
I changed

User daemon

Group daemon

to

User www

Group www

and

DocumentRoot "/apache2/htdocs"

to

DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"

and

<Directory "/apache2/htdocs">

to

<Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents">

and added

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

Edit httpd-userdir.conf

sudo nano -w /apache2/conf/extra/httpd-userdir.conf

The changes to httpd-userdir.conf I made:
I changed

UserDir public_html

to

UserDir Sites

To start and stop the server:
MySQL comes with a Preference Pane that allows you to start and stop it there. To start and stop Apache you need to first make sure that the default Apache shipped with OS X is stopped.

sudo /apache2/bin/apachectl start

sudo /apache2/bin/apachectl stop

I only ran into one issue, when trying to start the server I ran against the following error message (and no running server, of course):

httpd: Syntax error on line 53 of /apache2/conf/httpd.conf:

Cannot load /apache2/modules/libphp5.so into server:

Library not loaded: /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.15.dylib

Referenced from: /apache2/modules/libphp5.son  Reason: image not found

To fix this I did the following:

cd /usr/local/mysql/lib

sudo mkdir /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql

for i in `ls ./l*`; do sudo ln -sf /usr/local/mysql/lib/$i /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/$i; done

This creates soft links in the directory that libphp5.so is looking for the MySQL libraries.

Then it started right up! Wheee! (I did a quick test by dropping PhpMyAdmin into the /Library/WebServer/Documents folder and browsed to it – the whole Apache/PHP/MySQL is working correctly)

Technorati Tags: Apache 2.2, PHP5, MySQL 5, OS X

THESE BUILDS SHOULD BE USED AT YOUR OWN RISK FOR TESTING PURPOSES ONLY. THEY MAY CRASH OR CAUSE DATA LOSS.

As with any early development release there are lots of things that don’t work yet, such as printing, exporting to PDF, copy/paste, drang and drop, multiple monitors, etc. That’s to be expected. While I am a little tempted to run the alpha release and provide feedback to the development team, I don’t know that I actually have the time to devote to that sort of endeavor right now. Instead, I think I will jump on the first beta, and install it alongside the X11 version, so that I can chime in on testing at that stage.

For those who are interested, the Mac Porting team have blogs and a news section where you can keep up with development if you wish.

Technorati Tags: OpenOffice.org, OS X

I deleted my Parallels XP image (and subsequently ended up wishing I hadn’t) and used the Boot Camp assistant to set up my hard drive and install XP. I got XP set up and running, but had to call Microsoft to get it ‘activated’ since it saw it as a new install. Once that was taken care of I installed Office, and got the same kind of headache there – where the key wouldn’t work, because it said it had been installed on too many machines. I decided to leave that be for the time until I felt like waiting on the MS phone queue again.

I rebooted into OS X and loaded my now ‘active’ and ‘valid’ Windows XP under Parallels. As soon as it booted it gave me the message that I had 3 days to activate it as the hardware had changed significantly and it was no longer valid. I ddn’t feel like fighting it so I closed down Parallels and rebooted into XP where, surprise, I got the 3 day warning again!

So not only does loading the same image in a VM result in XP thinking it isn’t a valid copy, but it changes something in the registry somewhere, so that booting back into natively results in the same thing. I thought the concept of hardware profiles would help with this sort of thing, but apparently not. This is something that MS needs to address sooner rather than later as multicore machines make virtualization more common and loading a native image in a VM becomes a more common way of doing that.

An interesting side note: I got fed up with the whole validation issue and removed the XP partition and re-installed XP under Parallels the same way I did originally. I expected the phone calls for the XP key and the Office key etc, etc – but, it just accepted the keys and validated no questions asked.

Technorati Tags: Boot Camp, Parallels, XP, OS X