Brian Jepson’s Weblog

Parallels is driving me nuts. If I try to run Vista, it maxes out the CPU constantly, even in the background. In contrast, I’ve had two VMware Fusion VMs (Vista and XP) running in the background all morning, and I forgot they were there.

I installed Vista under Boot Camp today, and my Mac wouldn’t boot into Mac OS X afterwards. It was sitting there on the blue screen with the mouse cursor. Of course I blamed it on boot camp at first. I plugged it into Ethernet (wasn’t getting an Airport connection at this point) and ssh’d into it from another machine. Turns out it was hanging on this umount /Volumes/Foo that I had stuck into rc.local a long time ago. I have no idea why installing Vista would trigger that behavior, but it’s gone from that file now and boots up fine. Who do I talk to about getting that hour of my life back?

Anyone who’s talked to me about Vista in the past couple of months knows that I’m impressed with it. And I’ve even been known to say kind things about how Microsoft cleaned up the User Access Control (UAC) prompts in post-beta versions of Vista. But I read today that an installation package with a lot of digitally signed files can take a long time for the UAC prompt to come up; up to an hour in this case:

When installing on Windows Vista with User Account Control (UAC) active, there can be a substantial delay before the initial setup dialog is displayed. During this time, a UAC function is verifying digital signatures within the installation package. This service pack carries a large number of files causing the process to take up to one hour in some cases.

This explains a lot, actually. I’ve run into this exact problem (well, not an hour, but sometimes a few minutes or more), and the result is that I ended up clicking the installer several times wondering WTF is going on. Even if there’s no quick solution to this problem, Microsoft might want to have some kind of progress indicator explaining what’s going on. Although it seems sensible to turn off UAC while I’m installing this package, I’m going to leave it on and see how long it takes for the prompt to pop up.

Update: it took only three minutes to appear.

One of the things that is annoying me about Vista is that I can’t
connect to my SMB shares on my Mac. When I try to log in, it rejects my
password. I looked at /var/log/samba/log.smbd on my Mac, and here’s
what I saw:

[2006/09/21 13:55:45, 1] auth_ods.c:opendirectory_ntlmv2_auth_user(312)
  User "bjepson" failed to authenticate with
"dsAuthMethodStandard:dsAuthNodeNTLMv2" (-14090)   

So I poked around the Group Policy Edit (type gpedit.msc into the
search or address box and press enter). I drilled down into:

Local Computer Policy
  -> Computer Configuration
    -> Windows Settings
      -> Security Settings
        -> Local Policies
          -> Security Options

and I changed “Network security: LAN Manager authentication level” to
“Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated” and it
seems to work.

There’s been a lot of buzz about the Pre-RC1 build of Vista working with Boot Camp. I decided to give it a try, and it was pretty easy. You’ll want to perform a full backup before you try this!!!

1. First, run the BootCamp Assistant and delete your Windows installation. This will wipe out all your data, but will restore your Mac to a single partition. You only need to do this if you want to perform the next step.
2. I’m pretty sure Vista won’t run on a FAT32 file system, so you need some way to exchange files between Mac OS X and Windows. I think the best way to do this is to create a third partition. This post (read it all) has lots of details on this. On my MacBook with a 100GB drive, I used this command to shrink my Mac partition and create a 5GB partition for shared data and a 20GB partition for Vista:

   sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 72842723328B \
   "MS-DOS FAT32" Data 5368709120B  \
   "MS-DOS FAT32" Windows 21474836480B
   

3. Next, I rebooted, opened a Terminal, and ran this command to create a FAT32 file system on the Data partition (please check the output of diskutil list /dev/disk0 to be sure you are operating on the right partition first or you may wipe out important data!!!):

   sudo newfs_msdos /dev/disk0s3
   

4. Once I finished these steps, I inserted the Vista DVD, and rebooted the Mac. I held down the Option key as it was starting, and selected the Vista DVD as the boot media.
5. I went through the Vista installer as normal, and all was fine. The only oddity was that when it rebooted, it went into Mac OS X. I opened up System Preferences/Startup Disk and told it to boot from the new Windows partition.
6. I rebooted and setup continued as normal.

One drawback of this is that Bootcamp Assistant won’t run if you have these three partitions, which make it hard for you to burn new driver CDs. However, you should be able to Control-Click on the BootCamp Assistant app, choose Show Package Contents, and find the driver disk .img file that way. I’m sure there will be other annoyances involved with using a non-standard configuration, so I’m prepared to have to delete these partitions and start anew at least a few more times…

If you’re trying to get an OfficeJet d135 working with Beta 2 of Vista, you’ll probably get an error when you try to install the driver. If, like me, you did an upgrade installation from a previously-working XP installation, your printer may just mysteriously stop working.

I found that the DeskJet 990c driver that’s built into Vista works fine, and handles color as well as the two-sided printing accessory. (If you want to change your driver, open the Control Panel, click Printers under Hardware and Sound, and then right-click on the printer. Instead of choosing Properties, choose Properties from the “Run Elevated” sub-menu. Then use the Advanced tab to change the driver).

After all the news coming out of Macworld and CES, I find I’m thinking less about MacBooks than I am about dual core Intel chips. Over the past few months, my computers have been taking on very specific roles:

• My Athlon XP system that I built is really my games machine (recently upgraded as cheaply as possible to the minimum requirements of Half-Life 2: Lost Coast)

• The Dell laptop is more and more becoming my work machine (Word, Thunderbird, OpenOffice 2.0, etc.)

• And my 12″ PowerBook spends most of its time plugged into a 20″ monitor. I use it for organizing my music, scanning and editing my family’s slides from the 60s and 70s, and just about anything that has to do with digital media.

Now that core duo laptops are appearing everywhere, I have the opportunity to either buy a new Mac, or put that power where I really need it: a Windows notebook that has the muscle I need for gaming and my day-to-day work, and I could retire my current laptop and desktop.

And then there’s Vista… all these PC laptops coming out seem very much to be Vista-ready, but then again, it’s possible that the MacBook Pro is, as well. So if I wait a little while, maybe I can eliminate the three computers in my office by getting the one that really does everything I
need.