A Successful Leap for Leopard

I upgraded my MacBook to Leopard a while ago but I waited to upgrade my main MacMini.

With Leopard updates for my main apps (Parallels and Lightroom) I decided it was time to take the plunge. The upgrade went smoothly, although it seemed pretty slow - several hours. I'm not sure why it takes that long.

As a safety precaution I used SuperDuper to backup each machine before upgrading.

So far I haven't had any major problems. The first time I started Parallels I got the following error:


I found a blog post which said the MacFUSE included in Parallels is old and suggested installing the latest MacFuse. This seemed to do the trick, but:

• the error message seems backwards - the operating system was new, MacFUSE was old
• why didn't the Parallels update for Leopard include the required new version of MacFUSE?
• why did I have to get the solution from some user instead of from Parallels? even if the user community discovered the solution, wouldn't it make sense for Parallels to post it? (in fairness, maybe they have, but I didn't find it if they did)
  

Note: This problem doesn't stop Parallels from starting, it just stops it from mounting the Windows C drive in OS X

Now that Spotlight with Leopard lets you run the top application match by hitting enter, I was able to uninstall Google Desktop. (Nothing against Google Desktop, I just prefer to keep things simple if I can) (see my previous post)

Leopard also seems to have solved the issue of automatically mounting network drives. (see my previous post) so I was able to remove the login script I had created to do this, which was nice because it took a long time (why?) and slowed down logging in.

I do have a new complaint about OS X. The Finder doesn't have an option to show hidden files. I can understand hiding them by default, so does Windows. But at least Windows gives you a way to show them. This came up when I went to copy the .svn folder from a backup. It is possible to change Finder via a command line, but on top of not being user friendly, this also requires restarting Finder. This seems like an obvious weak point. Is there someone in Apple who refuses to recognize that you might occasionally want to see these files?

I'm still having problems with accessing my 4gb USB thumb drive from Parallels. At first I blamed this on the U3 software that came installed on it, but I removed this and reformatted and I'm still having problems. It works fine on my Windows machine at work. My current guess is that Parallels doesn't quite handle 4gb USB drives. The strange part is that it works fine, but after a short time it will hang during copying from it, and Windows Explorer can no longer access it. My 1gb USB thumb drive continues to work fine.

Ok, back to Ubuntu on Parallels. I copied the virtual machine that I had created on my MacBook over to my MacMini and started it up. No display problem, but the same problem with the Parallels Tool cd image showing garbled file names. Strangely I can't find anybody else with this particular problem. While flailing a bit more I rebooted the VM and lo and behold the Parallels Tools cd image had the right file names. I installed them and restarted X windows. It appears to work! One of the most noticeable features is being able to move the mouse seamlessly between OS X and the VM. I followed the same process on the MacBook and it also worked (although I could have sworn I tried rebooting before). So I appear to be back in business with Ubuntu (albeit starting from scratch with a new VM).

All in all, a successful day!

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Or should that be One Step Forward, Two Steps back?

Yesterday I was back to working on the multi-threaded ACE Suneido server. It started off really well. I got the server actually running, could connect and disconnect, and make simple requests and get responses. A very good milestone.

The obvious next step is to try to start up a Suneido client IDE using the new server. This is a big jump because even to start up requires a large number of requests of different kinds. I didn't really expect it to work, but programmers are eternal optimists :-)

I got a variety of weird errors and memory faults - not surprising. But amongst these errors was one that said something like "GC collecting from unknown thread". Oh yeah, I knew this was going to be an issue but I'd pushed it to the back of my mind. The garbage collector needs to know about all the threads in order to take their stacks and registers etc. into account. The way the Boehm GC normally does this is by requiring you to call their create thread function which is a wrapper around the OS one.

The problem is, ACE is creating the threads. I found where ACE calls create thread and thankfully there was a single point I could modify to call the GC version. But, I was using ACE via a DLL which means it can't call functions in the main program (where the GC one is).

The obvious solution is to not use a DLL, to statically link in the ACE code. Sounds easy. I even found the option "static_libs=1" that would build static libraries. But it doesn't work. It builds a static library alright, but when I try to link it into Suneido I get a bunch of "multiple definitions" and "undefined references". Suspiciously, many of the names were "_imp_..." which seems a lot like the way DLL's work. My guess would be that "static_libs=1" isn't working fully, which isn't too surprising given that the "normal" usage is with shared libraries (DLL). In software, "taking the path less traveled" is often a recipe for frustration.

I started digging into the maze of headers, configs, makefiles, and ifdefs but I ran out of time. Presumably it's solvable. You can see why people like to use things like .Net or Java where at least some of these low level issues are handled for you.

At the same time as I was working on this, I downloaded Ubuntu 7.10 and created a new Parallels VM (on my MacBook while I was working on my main machine). I used the alternate cd with the text based installer as recommended by other people. It went quite smoothly (except for crashing OS X the first time I started the install), and no display problems. But when I tried to install the Parallels Tools, the disk image appeared "corrupted" - only a single file and its name was random garbage characters. I tried rebooting the VM, restarting Parallels, and rebooting the MacBook but it didn't help. I searched on the web but didn't find any references to this problem. I have upgraded my MacBook to Leopard (the new version of OS X) so the problem may be related to that. When I get time I'll try running this VM on my Mac Mini which hasn't been upgraded to Leopard yet.

Still Problems with Ubuntu 7.10 on Parallels on Mac

Larry has been patiently trying to help me with the network problem on my Ubuntu virtual machine (see the comments on Ubuntu on Parallels on Mac) He may have even found the problem.

But when I applied the fix and rebooted I was back to the problems from More Fun With Ubuntu on Parallels - unable to boot because the X display won't start. I did some more thrashing around and some more web searching. Lots of people seem to have this problem and there are various proposed solutions. I wonder if these "solutions" aren't really solutions - it just happened to work as it does for me occasionally. Frustratingly, lots of people also appear to not have this problem - it works fine for them.

This is on a Mac (mini) so you can't blame non-standard hardware. Ubuntu is one of the most common (if not the most common) version of Linux. I haven't loaded up OS X with a lot of junk software. So why am I still faced with these frustrating issues? I don't want to have to be an X Windows expert and mess around with xorg.conf. Running in a virtual machine adds some complexity, but it also reduces the complexity since the virtual machine is more "standard" than real machines.

I don't have a lot installed in my Ubuntu so I am going to try a fresh install. At least with VM's this doesn't mean I have to wipe out my previous one. It would be nice if Parallels had a prebuilt Ubuntu 7.10 VM but they only have 7.04. I could go back to 7.04 but sooner or later I'll want to update.

Some of my recurring frustrations are, no doubt, due to my staying to close to the "bleeding edge". But, (a) I want to keep up with the latest - that's part of my business, and (b) not doing updates has it's own problems with incompatibility, security, etc. and leaves you facing even scarier "big" updates, albeit not so often.

Positive Feedback for a Change!

It seems like all I do is complain about my frustrations with computers so I thought I should post a positive comment for a change.

I went to check what version of g++ I had on my Ubuntu on Parallels. Here's what I got:

andrew@MacMini-Ubuntu:~$ g++ --version
The program 'g++' can be found in the following packages:
* g++
* pentium-builder
Try: sudo apt-get install <selected>
bash: g++: command not found

This is a vast improvement over just "command not found". Thumbs up to Ubuntu (or Linux or wherever this originated).

More Fun With Ubuntu on Parallels

I started my Ubuntu virtual machine to get my networking file to continue looking into the network not starting automatically.

A notice came up about upgrading from 7.04 to 7.10. Without really thinking about it (stupid) I went ahead and ran the upgrade. It worked fine till it was finished and it restarted and the X display couldn't start. So I did what I should have done before I started the upgrade and I googled for problems with 7.10 on Parallels. Sure enough, lots of other people were having the same problem. There were various suggestions of how to work around the problem but there didn't seem to be a consensus. Parallels themselves seem to be avoiding the issue. I followed one of the suggestions and booted in recovery mode, which took me to a terminal window but I wasn't sure where to go from there. Then I tried booting the older kernel which seemed to start ok. Then I tried re-installing the Parallels tools (another suggestion). It ended up with the same problem of not being able to restart the display. I stopped and restarted the machine and let it boot normally and it worked!? I have no idea what that means. Is it fixed? Which part of my thrashing around was helpful? Or is the problem intermittent and I just happened to get lucky?

I'd had enough for one day so I just suspended the machine and left it.

By the way, it still has the same problem of not starting the networking automatically. I guess it was too much to hope that problem would go away by itself.

Ubuntu on Parallels on Mac

I just installed Ubuntu on my Mac under Parallels using these instructions:

How to install Ubuntu 7.04 in OS X using Parallels Desktop 3.0

It seemed to go smoothly. Of course, Ubuntu immediately wanted to download a pile of updates, but that worked ok.

The only problem is that you seem to have to manually turn on the networking within Ubuntu every time you boot it up. The instructions mentioned this, but I thought it was just during installation. There may be a fix, I haven't looked yet. I don't think it's a big deal because normally I just suspend the virtual machines rather than shutdown and restart them. Hmmm... that's assuming the network stays turned on after being suspended, I haven't actually tested that.

Parallels has a pre-installed Ubuntu virtual machine, but the downloads were very slow so I gave up. But I should be able to take the virtual machine I've now created and copy it from my Mac Mini to my Mac Book.

Aside from curiosity, one of my motivations for installing Ubuntu is to get back to working on porting Suneido to Linux. I should be able to do a lot of that natively under OS X but I assume I'll still want to work under Linux as well.