Dual Boot Windows 7 or Vista with Mac OS X Leopard

Since the beginning of this year I had a lot of fun challenging myself to install Leopard on one of my PCs, a Samsung NP-M55. I could say that the whole process was maybe more pain than fun, but the result worth the time spent – you’ll get a Mac without really buying one.
I don’t have to mention that since a Mac OS X is designed to work only with Apple hardware, even with the big community of people that are trying to mod drivers for PC hardware to work on Mac, there is no guarantee that your computer will ever even boot Mac :)

Anyway, I decided to write a few guides on different topics based on my experiments.
One big problem I faced was dual (triple) booting.

What is needed:

    - Windows 7 or Windows Vista DVD

    - Leopard or Snow Leopard DVD, I used the iPC OSx86 10.5.6 Universal PPF6 Final v1.1.iso which can be found on the internet, but any other image is good.(iPC)
     - EasyBCD 2 (I used beta) get it here

The steps are the following:
1) Install Windows 7, or Vista, or if you have it already installed, you can skip this step, reinstalling is not required.

2) Make sure you have a partition ready formatted or free for installing Mac OSx. Installing Leopard takes up around 8Gb, so I would recommend at least 10 Gb.

3) Boot from the Leopard DVD. When selecting where to install it, open Disk Utility from the menu. Select the empty partition and format it as a Mac OS Partition. Install Leopard on it after.

4) After reboot, you won’t be able to boot back into Windows unless the boot manager is repaired. To do this, use the Windows 7 DVD to boot and select System Recovery. Once the System Recovery Options window appears, choose the Startup Repair Option. As soon as it will finish repairing the boot, restart your computer.Remove the Windows DVD, and continue booting in windows.


4') As an extra step in case you have more than one windows partition on your computer, and the System Recovery could not repair your boot for both Windows installations. This occurs because the partition was marked as inactive. Activating it can be done from System Recovery Command Prompt using diskpart. More details here.
In case you can still boot in one of the Windows OS, execute Computer Management, select Disk Management, right click on your other windows partition, and select Mark partition as Active. Then Reboot.


5) Now to add the boot entry for Mac OS X. Boot in Windows. Run EasyBCD . Click on Add/Remove Entries. Select Mac tab on Add an Entry group, then name your Entry, and in the Mode, select MBR. The click add Entry.

That’s it. Now reboot!
There is the problem of drivers, as the installation is not very easy and you have to do a lot of manual customisation, but I will discuss this in another post. In the meantime check Hackint0sh, InsanelyMac, OX86Project

Enjoy your Mac :)

Adrian

VideoTrace

A very promising project from the Australian Centre for Visual Technologies.

“Quoting their site: VideoTrace is a system for interactively generating realistic 3D models of objects from video—models that might be inserted into a video game, a simulation environment, or another video sequence. The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modelled over one or more frames of the video. By interpreting the sketch drawn by the user in light of 3D information obtained from computer vision techniques, a small number of simple 2D interactions can be used to generate a realistic 3D model. Each of the sketching operations in VideoTrace provides an intuitive and powerful means of modelling shape from video, and executes quickly enough to be used interactively. Immediate feedback allows the user to model rapidly those parts of the scene which are of interest and to the level of detail required. The combination of automated and manual reconstruction allows VideoTrace to model parts of the scene not visible, and to succeed in cases where purely automated approaches would fail..”
Adrian

The song of 99 bottles of beer

Almost everyone of us has for surely ran into this song. There is nothing special about it except the number of bottles in each verse that decreases until it reaches 0 and then everything starts over - what better example of a "loop".
So why not writing the song in all possible languages we can think about :)

Check it out here

http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/

Enjoy!

Adrian

Execute XBAP in Google Chrome

This is an article for the fans of Chrome - viewing hosted WPF pages in Chrome.
By default this is not supported in Google Chrome (and apparently is not going to be supported officially too soon).
The support can be manually added by copying of libraries from an installation of Mozilla. So to be able to add this functionality, a few steps need to be followed:

Make sure you installed both last version of Chrome and Mozilla Firefox 3.0.0+.

The following libraries found in Mozilla Firefox instalation directory
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox
have to be coppied to Chrome instalation directory;

Assumming Chrome is installed in the following directory, USER corresponds to your windows user.
C:\Users\[USER]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application

js3250.dll
mozcrt19.dll
nspr4.dll
nss3.dll
nssutil3.dll
plc4.dll
plds4.dll
smime3.dll
sqlite3.dll
ssl3.dll
xpcom.dll
xul.dll


This is about it. Enjoy Chrome!
Adrian

Eiffel Tower by Night from St Cloud

 
No comment
Adrian

How to check if your CPU is 32 or 64 bit?

When trying to install a 64bit app into a 32bit OS, the OS will report your system as being a 32bit system even if your CPU implements 64bit architecture. At this level it is the OS who reports itself as a 32bit, and prevents the execution of a 64 bit app, but there should be no problems executing a 32bit app on a 64bit OS.

But the question is how to really check if the CPU is 64bit or not.
The 64bit compatible CPU includes a “lm” flag (that stands for LONG MODE) that implements the EM64T instruction. This bit is common for both Intel and AMP CPUID.

Anyways, the fastest way to find if the CPU is 32 or 64 (in windows) would be to download the CPU-Z tool, and once you execute it check under the CPU tab, Processor section.
If in the list of supported CPU Instructions, the option EM64T is present, your CPU supports 64bit. 
    

Adrian

Windows 7 build 7048 x86/x64 Leaked

This release labeled Release Candidate 1 can be downloaded on various sources (torrent, rapidshare, megaupload).

Name: 7048_x64_Ultimate_EN_DVD
Size: 3.31 GB
x64

Name: 7048.0.090219-1845_x86fre_client_en-us_Ultimate_EN_DVD
Size: 2.61 GB
x86

Adrian