Installing Mac OS X on a Normal PC / Non Apple PC

The news is not new, but nowadays a lot of tutorials about how to install Apple’s OS X on an x86 computer are available, and the procedure is now followable by (almost) any PC user.

I want to remember to everybody that it’s illegal to install and use OS X without a valid licence. I take no responsability for any invalid use of this tutorial.
In addiction, please take note that the following procedure may cause a data loss, so do only if you know what are you doing.

We’ll see how to install OS X on a Windows XP machine, on a 7Gb dedicated partition. So you have to prepare your hard disk with:

- The first, primary and bootable partition with a normal Win XP installation;
- A second empty NTFS primary partition;
- Any other partition you like.

Please refer to other documentations if you don’t know how to deal with hard drive partitions. You can use, for example, Partition Magic to change your HD partitions… anyway if you are not experienced in partitioning, my tip is stop here.

Then, you have to get some software:

1. An Ubuntu Linux Live CD: you can get it, or you can download it. It’s free. A valid alternative to Ubuntu that I found is Knoppix STD: use it if you’ve problems with Ubuntu;
2. VmWare Workstation it’s a commercial application, but a free trial is available;
3. The Deadmoo’s OS X Linux distro: this is available on P2P networks, usually under tiger-x86.tar.bz2 filename. I want to remember again that you’ve no right to download and to use it, if you don’t have a valid Apple’s OS X Licence.

- Boot from Ubuntu (of Knoppix) Live CD;
- Open a Terminal Window, get administrative rights (it should be sufficient to enter the command “sudo su“)… and type:
cfdisk /dev/hda
- The CFdisk utility will start: choose the partition where you want to install OS X (it should be the second one, but please make attention!) and choose “TYPE”. Now write “AF” (without quotes, of course) as type, and confirm changes choosing “WRITE”. The partition you chose will be erased and it’s type will be set to AF (Apple Format).

Now reboot, go back to Windows XP, install and open VmWare.
Create a new “FreeBSD” virtual machine. When asked to choose the primary hard drive for the virtual machine, choose your phisical hard disk; Also add a second hard drive to the virtual machine: the virtual drive inside Deadmoo’s archive; insert your Ubuntu CD and make sure that your phisical DVD/CD-rom reader is enabled in the virtual machine.
Then start the virtual machine and press on ESC as the machine begin, to enter boot menu: choose to boot from CD. Ubuntu should start booting in the virtual machine’s window. On the contrary, if you see Windows starting, immediately turn off the virtual machine and check CD-Rom settings (in this case, the CD boot has not started and your Windows XP is going to start into itself!).

When Ubuntu is ready, open a terminal window and type a command like this:

dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=/dev/hda2/ bs=8192
hdb (2nd hard drive) should be the mounted Deadmoo’s image: our source;
hda2 should be the 2nd partition of the 1st hard drive (our phisical one): the destination.
CHANGE HDB1 and HDA2 with YOUR SETTINGS!

If you’re not sure about partitions, type:
fdisk /dev/hda -l
to get a list of your connected hard drives and relative partitions identifiers.

The process will take about 5-10 minutes. At the end, you can shut down the virtual machine.

Download this file.
It contains a file named chain0. Extract it to the root of your C:\ partition and add the following line:
C:\chain0=”Mac OS X”
to your C:\boot.ini file.

Now reboot your PC and choose Mac OS X at the boot list screen. Then the “Darwin boot” will ask you to select the partition with Mac OS X installed: select it with arrow keys.

Now try to type -s and then enter. If everything goes ok, at the prompt type:
sh /etc/rc
passwd curtis
passwd root
and enter your new password when asked. If anything is wrong, try to boot with -x or without arguments.

Please take note that sometimes it’s needed to boot several times (with -s, -x, or with no arguments) to get OS X work… I don’t know the reason, but it happens!

NOTE : This method is not an emulation (like others that run Mac OS X into a virtual machine. Here VmWare is used only to transfer the OS X image to the 2nd partition). Mac OS runs directly on the x86 machine, so speed is the best you can get.

Of course our PCs are not exactly the hardware thought by Apple’s developers, so speed is not the same of an original Macintosh.

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The Amazing 3MB Operating System

Kolibri desktop is a small 3MB Operating System, which is written entirely in machine code (CPU Language) and is not based on Linux, Windows or any other variants. What is surprising is the number of applications packed into this tiny file size. There are a whole bunch of games, a basic tables editor, a compiler, a text editor, a bouquet of demos, a text based web browser and more. There is also DosBox, which lets you run almost any DOS game on Kolibri. While not meant for serious use, the tiny OS shows how bloated Windows and Linux really are.

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How to check data usage in BSNL DataOne ?

Many of my friends in India use BSNL DataOne Broad Band connection because it's quite cheap on pocket, but many of them have problem viewing there data usage status.

Here is the link to check it :

http://10.241.0.195/webLogin.jsp

Just navigate to the following link and enter your username and password provided to you. You will be displayed few menu options. Click on "Service Records" and check the data usage of the required month.

Note : Use Internet Explorer as the browser and if the link above does not work, then reset all the settings of IE and clear all cookies and history and restart the browser.

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Quick tips to drive traffic to your blog or website

If you started a blog and you want to make some future,you need to concentrate on your traffic in the start,rather than getting your friends to click on the ads.But how to make people come to your website,read it and come again.Analysing and detailing it will take almost a year.Here by im posting some quick tips for the new bloggers.

    Content :You post even just one post a day,it should have content which has quality.Its better to have single good post than 10 bad ones.viewers always appreciate the pages with good content.You should make your best effort in getting them back to your site again.Make your posts conversational, pithy and topical. Keep them short and stick to one topic per post.Write often and regularly so that both readers and search engines visit your blog more often.

    Search Engines : One of the best sources of traffic if you make your site well organised.Come up with nice keywording and you will get good page ranking .The more is your page rank the more the ad provide want to pay to you.Make sure your blog URL has got very good keyword in its title.Use submission sites to submit your URL in all the search engines like google,yahoo..Dont forget to submit your feed in RSS directories.There are sites which has submission directory links in bulk.Go there and submit your feed URL.use feedstats to attract users like the feedburner chicklet i have in my subscribe box.

    Signature : Post your blog address in the signature in your email making the users know your presence in the web.Go to each and every place where you find a lot of surfers like forums,social networks,community discussion and write your link over there.Write your link in the comments of the most famous blogs.But remember that Google dont count this as a linkback to your site.

    Email subscription : Dont forget to give a link of subscribe to updates through email on your blog.

    Social bookmarking: Add a link of submit my site to digg,redditt,blinklist,buzz it and ....at the end of each article your write like i have on my blog.Submit your articles to these sites to get best traffic.

    Backlinking : Try to contact authors of good blogs and request them for backlinks.It should nt look to them that you are begging,Write a letter like this"I have something interesting for you on my webpage.If you find my site or blog interesting,give me a link o my site on your webpage"


I hope these tips might had helped you to a good extent. Don't forget to post your comments and any other additions

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Robots.txt : The most powerful text file on web

"Robots.txt" : You must have heard the name of this text file, if you are a web developer or you have got a little knowledge of search engine optimization. And if you don't know about this, one of the most powerful text files, then read on...

Robots.txt is a regular text file, as its extension says, which directs the search engine robots and crawlers while crawling your web pages.
It has got a piece of code in a special format, which actually is a set of rules for the web crawlers.

The most basic robots.txt file has the following code within it...

User-agent: *
Allow: /

This file allows all the crawlers to crawl your web page.

There can be many other methods to declare a "robots.txt" file.
You can allows some bots and disallow others.

The Format of Robots.txt

The file consists of one or more records separated by one or
more blank lines.

The record starts with one or more User-agent lines, followed by one or more Disallow lines,
as detailed below. Unrecognized headers are ignored.

User-agent

The value of this field is the name of the robot the record is describing access policy for.
If more than one User-agent field is present the record describes an identical access policy for more than one robot. At least one field needs to be present per record.

If the value is '*', the record describes the default access policy for any robot that has not matched any of the other records. It is not allowed to have multiple such records in the "/robots.txt" file.

Disallow

The value of this field specifies a partial URL that is not to be visited. This can be a full path, or a partial path; any URL that starts with this value will not be retrieved.
For example, Disallow: /help disallows both /help.html and /help/index.html, whereas Disallow: /help/ would disallow /help/index.html but allow /help.html.

Any empty value, indicates that all URLs can be retrieved.

So if you want your webpages to be crawled and indexed in the search engines in a way you like, then go and generate a robots.txt file for youe website.

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Ubuntu to go Monthly ?

 

A member of the Ubuntu Technical Board, the body responsible for deciding the direction that Canonical's distro should take when it comes to technical matters, has proposed that the distro abandon its current six-monthly development cycle and switch to a monthly release instead, as used by Firefox.

At the moment, Ubuntu releases come twice a year, in April and October, and this predictability - along with an up-to-date implementation of the Gnome desktop - is one of the key features that made it such a success when it launched as a Debian spin-off in October 2004.

These releases are supported for 18 months, except for the business-oriented long-term support (LTS) releases, which Canonical continues to support for three years on the desktop, and on the server for five years. The system seems to work well as it is, so why change it?

Scott James Remnant, the author of the proposal, said: "There is an incredible emphasis on the Ubuntu planning process of targeting features for particular releases. This is the exact thing you're not supposed to do with a time-based release schedule:

A better way

He then went on to criticize the motivations of the Ubuntu developers: "Unfortunately Canonical's own performance review and management is also based around this schedule. The Ubuntu developers so employed (the vast majority) have such fundamentals as their pay, bonuses. etc., dictated by how many of their assigned features and work items are into the release by feature freeze. It's not the only requirement, but it's the biggest one."

Summing up, he gave three reasons for Ubuntu to switch to the monthly release cycle: "The original reason for the six-month cycle has already been forgotten: features are targeted towards releases, rather than released when ready: because the original base for the release schedule (Gnome) is no longer a key component of the distribution: because no other key component has adopted this schedule."

We've plotted what a monthly release cycle would look like for Ubuntu compared with a few other big hitters on the distro landscape. Updating a distro is a time-consuming process, and while it is satisfying to have the latest and greatest software, monthly distro updates could be too much hassle for some.

The Third Way

The problem that Remnant has identified seems to us to be more closely related to the Ubuntu developers' pay structure rather than any problem inherent in the release cycle. But if Canonical was to adopt a structure that enabled it to release more often, the logical way would be a rolling release cycle, as used to brilliant effect by Arch. Even OpenSUSE is getting on the bandwagon now with Tumbleweed.

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