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.