I run a lot of VMs in Parallels. (Currently I am running 7, although not all at once, of course.) I end up with a bunch of red generic Parallels VM alias icons on my desktop. Which means that the usual visual quick clues (color, logos, etc) aren’t there and I have to look at the text underneath. Sometimes I am in a rush and start Windows Server 2008 instead of Windows 7 Pro, or Ubuntu Linux instead of Debian Linux (one is set up as a desktop and one as a server with no X).

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

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I recently installed the openCollabNet OS X Universal binary for SVN 1.5.4 from Tigris and found something odd. I had installed the openCollabNet binary for 1.4.4 a while back, and don’t recall changing any install paths, but apparently something changed. After installing I ran svn –version and saw something that I shouldn’t have seen:

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.

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I decided I would be brave and download Minefield (the latest “trunk build” from Firefox) and try it out. I have been reading several reviews about how fast it is, and wanted to see for myself.

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.

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