binaryfactory.ca

update: After 24hours, I’m pretty sure it helped quite a bit. My phone did not slow down to a crawl today nor did iOS start killing my fast app switching backgrounded apps. Will it last? Will it blend? Of course not, it’s VIRTUAL memory!

With the latest iOS 4 supporting multitasking or with any other version of iOS that has been set free from its jail, I’ve noticed that my old, slow iPhone 3g has been having memory issues.

With iOS 3 and multitasking applications such as backgrounder, I could at least manage what app I wanted to leave open in the background. Sure, it took more CPU but at least I could manage it.

With iOS 4 (multitasking enabled using the latest pwnagetools) – many apps will keep using RAM in the background if they support Fast App Switching. As more and more apps get recompiled with iOS 4 and fast app switching enabled, I noticed I needed to reboot my iPhone from time to time or manually close these apps. And as we know, task managers, blowing it, etc…

Here is how I enabled swapping on my iPhone – sorry for not quoting any definite source, the knowledge I found was spread out through many forums and no clear source could be found. In any case, I’m certainly not the one who thought about this.

iOS is a stripped down version of OS X, which supports swapping, obviously. However, the flash in your iPhone is not made to handle thousands of writes and this is why Apple doesn’t do swapping on it. Be warned, this will probably end up killing it. How fast? Hard to say. Considering my 3g is 2 years old and I’m eligible for an upgrade soon, I just don’t really care. Please inspect the file before you upload it and understand what it means – I’m not responsible for you nuking your phone. Back it up in iTunes first, too, just in case you have to restore using DFU Mode.

1. Jailbreak your iPhone ( I recommend pwnagetools )
2. Install OpenSSH From cydia
3. Connect to your iPhone using an SCP client (Cyberduck, WinSCP, Filezilla..)
4. Download this file and rename it from .txt to .plist com.apple.dynamic_pager
5. Upload this file to /System/Library/LaunchDaemons
6. Reboot

You will now notice that even after opening a few apps, available memory reported by SBSettings will remain close to 30-35Mb.

On top of that, if you browse to /var/vm , you will see that it created a swap file.

Msi Wind Forums • View topic – 100% Working Snow Leopard Retail install

This solution seems to work. Here are the exact steps I followed

1) Image your Snow Leopard CD

2) Restore the image on your USB stick

3) Run NetbookMaker (the instructions mention running Netbookinstaller which is an error)

4) Boot the USB stick

5) Format the drive as 1 partition, make sure in options you select GUID partitions. (This is in Utilities/Disk Utility if you’re not used to this)

6) Install…

7) Boot and install the Realtek drivers ( http://files.binaryfactory.ca/windtools/Realtek_RTL8187SE_MacOS10.5_Driver_073_UI_1.6.2.zip )

Reboot. At this point, video works, Wifi works, sound doesn’t, and I haven’t tested everything else.

9) Enable Filevault. The whole point of Netbooks is to bring them to places where you’ll forget them isn’t it?
9.5) Enable Time Machine (See point 9)

10) Install 10.6.1 as I had forgotten to slipstream it to my USB stick. I didn’t install the combo. I’m such a rebel.

More to come tomorrow or Friday !

Right click Safari, click Get info, check the Run in 32bit mode box !
Tada!

I have just upgraded my Macbook pro to 10.5.8.

I didn’t use the combo update for two reasons:

1) My ADSL is totally messed up, waiting for Bell to fix it, so 700+megs is insane for an update
2) I figured that since my OS X install was about a WEEK OLD that it could handle updates easily.

The install went fine, I rebooted.. and now I can’t even launch Firefox 3.5 !

Update: I rebooted a second time, and now Firefox seems to work fine. My spotlight index appears to be wiped, which I assume is normal.

Weird.

Here are a few quickies I learned in the past few days:

10.5.6 upgrade

10.5.6 seems to be easier to install from 10.5.5 than 10.5.4 . 10.5.4 to 10.5.5 only messed up the video on my test, and I did not bother fixing it before going to 10.5.6 , which as usual messed with my keyboard, but not with the trackpad. With the help of the on screen keyboard, I was able to re-install the Video kexts and keyboard kext from this pack (Thanks Vivarey! – http://files.binaryfactory.ca/windtools/10.5.6%20upgrade%20pack%20v2.zip ). A reboot later, and the keyboard/trackpad are working fine, USB is working fine, webcam works.

Sound switching

Another thing I found out is sound switching to headphones, which didn’t work properly in 10.5.4, and I had some issues with my first 10.5.6 that I did not bother fixing with (not related to the update).

You will need the CHUD tools as well as a switch script. Install CHUD and run the switch script to switch audio output. I have indexed the script in Quicksilver so I can easily trigger it – however, it will prompt for a sudo password. It is doable to compile an applescript with the password embedded, however, I don’t mind typing the password in and hate hard-coding passwords into scripts, as well as storing them. Get the switch.sh script here: http://files.binaryfactory.ca/windtools/switch.sh . As far as CHUD goes, I am not allowed to distribute it but you can get it from Apple for free if you register as a developper, or maybe you can find it somewhere else!

USB Problems

While I was back on 10.5.4 , I experienced USB troubles related to Kernel/Extension mismatch. My USB mouse would sometimes only work when plugged in at boot, and sometimes my iPhone would just not be recognized. I have not used this new install for too long on 10.5.6 but for now everything seems to work fine. So if you are experiencing USB mismatch issues with an older version, especially if you have used the MSIWindOSx.iso installer, you might want to try updating it.

I received my MSI Wind netbook yesterday. It is the Linux version, so the hacks using the HD install helper to install Mac OS to another partition are not good for me, and I don’t own another Mac, so I can’t restore the ISO to the USB Stick easily.

I’m planning on using it as a portable internet machine (duh), along with my iPhone and PdaNet for 3g tethering, as well as using it at home hooked to an external monitor and keyboard as a low-power desktop and torrent device.

All files listed here are available for download at the bottom of this post.

First, grab a 4gig+ USB stick and the OS X Installer ISO.

Format the USB stick using Fat32.

Boot your current Linux installation, and run this as root:****as pointed out in a comment below, this may not be necessary at all. However i find it good practice to wipe the MBR before installing an OS that wasn’t really designed to handle being installed on systems with other boot loaders than its own****

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1

Be sure to replace the X with the proper letter for your hard drive. This will destroy the partition table and master boot record.

Then, using Leopard HD Helper version 0.3 (Google to find it, newer versions might be better) we will create the bootable OS X Install USB stick.

Run DDMac.exe

In the first field, browse to your previously downloaded OS X Iso.

Select the USB drive as the destination. You will get a warning about the driver, ignore it.

In my case, I unchecked boot.ini – you would leave it if you were running the tool directly on the Wind to install from another partition.

Leave the other checkboxes checked, then click Start (the only button).

Sometimes, start is grayed out. Browse to the ISO, check and uncheck a bunch of stuff and it usually becomes available. Browsing to the ISO, unchecking the “write” box (between the destination pull-down menu and the start button’), choosing the destination and checking Write again seems to be a good combination most of the time.

Once you click start, it will take around 10 minutes, and the progress bar isn’t a big help. It helps if your USB Stick has a LED, because the app does not take much CPU and you could think it has died. Be patient, grab a cup of coffee..

Once it is done, remove the USB Drive properly, and connect it to the Wind. Boot it by using the F11 menu on the Wind.

Once you get to the Select Destination screen, you  might not see your hard drive at all, only the USB stick. Go in the Utilities menu, then chose Disk Utility. From there, you should see your HD and be able to format it properly. I used only 1 partition, even though I am a fan of having my “/home” on another one, simply  because I have no OS X experience and figured one partition would be OK for now.

The install should proceed normally. Once finished, sound should already work, as well as standby, some FN keys like volume, etc.

We can now install the RTL8187SE Wifi Driver from RealTek. Simple run it, it will install the driver and the GUI to configure it (it will not be detected as a native airport device).

Once that is done, install the Ethernet Kext (Kernel Extension) file to enable Ethernet (another reboot might be required). How? Grab Paul O’Brien’s Wind driver package, and simply drag the RT1000 Kext to the Kext helper utility included in his package.

Once that was done, I ran a Software update to 10.5.6.

This killed my Keyboard, trackpad, and messed up the video driver.

I hooked up a USB keyboard and mouse, logged on, and found on the web the Vilerey Update package which contains all the Kext files you will need to reinstall to make the keyboard and trackpad work. You might have other devices not working such as the Network card, those drivers are also included..

Files:

http://files.binaryfactory.ca/windtools/

Leopard HD Helper 0.3

RTL8187SE Wifi Driver

Paul O’Brien’s package. Thanks Paul, great package, I hope you don’t mind me mirroring it here !

Vileray 10.5.6 upgrade package v2

The only other files required are an OS X Iso (I Used MSIWindOSX.ISO )

You have probably noticed that the “New” category in the App store is..well.. not that new.

Pinchmedia has started aggregating info from the app store to compile it into RSS feeds.

 

http://www.pinchmedia.com/your-view-into-the-app-s… for all the info.

 

For the lazy ones (*cough* efficient *cough*):

 

New app feed

New free app feed

Here is another post I had on my Wiki that I think is still useful.

Purpose of this article

A lot of people encounter problems using Entourage 2004 on Exchange 2007 system. Errors with little detail such as “error 170″ happen when trying to receive or send email.

Solution

A few things need to be checked on the OWA side of things and a special way to enter the URL in entourage.

How to do it

On your Exchange Outlook web access server:

Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager

Open the web site containing your owa application. At the same level as the owa application, you should have folders called Exchange and Exchweb. Those are used for legacy applications.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you do not have these folders, use this command, posted by Mike Willis on http://benskelton.blogs.com/ben_skeltons_blog/2007/01/entourage_and_e.html (It is a simple command but I saw it there first, hence the credits) :

New-OwaVirtualDirectory -name exchange -OWAVersion Exchange2003or2000 -VirtualDirectoryType mailboxes

Then go in the Web Service Extensions at the bottom left of the IIS manager. Right click WebDav in the list, and enable it. After all of this, you might want to reset or restart IIS.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In your Entourage Exchange connection settings

Open Entourage. With a bit of luck, it will connect with your old settings. If not, go edit the Exchange Server field in your configuration, and set it like this:

https://exchange.server.blah/exchange/user@host.com

User@host being your default email address, not your local domain account, unless they are the same of course.

It should then connect properly. If not, feel free to post in the talk pages and I will try to help you out!