Another day of Windows de-installation

Wooohh, I love that sentence…
.

This weekend I spent some time playing with virtual machines on my
Intel-Mac.Due to the lack of virtualization support in the current Mac OS X
release, rumors say it might be introduced in the next major
release of Mac OS Leopard, the only way to run another operating
system simlutanously is by using a virtual machine emulation
software.
For example: QEMU or its Mac pendant Q

Q is optimized for speed on Mac hardware and already available as a
universal binary, which means that it will provide near native
performance for x86-architecture based operating systems like
Windows, or a linux distribution running beside Mac OS, e.g. Gentoo
Linux as it doesn’t need to translate all the
CPU operations to a foreign architecture.

Q makes everything amazingly easy. Just download a OS-system image
from http://free.oszoo.org or any usual installer-cd.iso, setup a
harddisk-image by entering the amount of MBytes and boot.

I tried Gentoo 2006 and ReactOS (a WinNT-Clone) and both work
perfectly and quiet fast besides Mac OS.

But right after installing the MacOS provided X11-package, I asked
myself, why I would need another OS.
I found no reason.
Virtual machines shutdown.
Mac OS is simply great.

I’m not missing a single application that I had used before on
win/linux, and thanks to Apples Xcode (IDE) I will write my own
application if I’ll feel that I would miss something.

Apple, Intel,
good job.

This weekend I spent some time playing with virtual machines on my
Intel-Mac.Due to the lack of virtualization support in the current Mac OS X
release, rumors say it might be introduced in the next major
release of Mac OS Leopard, the only way to run another operating
system simlutanously is by using a virtual machine emulation
software.
For example: QEMU or its Mac pendant Q

Q is optimized for speed on Mac hardware and already available as a
universal binary, which means that it will provide near native
performance for x86-architecture based operating systems like
Windows, or a linux distribution running beside Mac OS, e.g. Gentoo
Linux as it doesn’t need to translate all the
CPU operations to a foreign architecture.

Q makes everything amazingly easy. Just download a OS-system image
from http://free.oszoo.org or any usual installer-cd.iso, setup a
harddisk-image by entering the amount of MBytes and boot.

I tried Gentoo 2006 and ReactOS (a WinNT-Clone) and both work
perfectly and quiet fast besides Mac OS.

But right after installing the MacOS provided X11-package, I asked
myself, why I would need another OS.
I found no reason.
Virtual machines shutdown.
Mac OS is simply great.

I’m not missing a single application that I had used before on
win/linux, and thanks to Apples Xcode (IDE) I will write my own
application if I’ll feel that I would miss something.

Apple, Intel,
good job.

This weekend I spent some time playing with virtual machines on my
Intel-Mac.

Year after year I enviously watch he
development on Apple’s newest Mac creations, Mac OS X, iPod’s,
iMac’s, Mac mini and this year finally Apple decided to switch over
processor technology from PowerPC over to Intel CPU’s.The biggest showstopper for me was their high selling prices . But
with their new Intel Core chips which you can’t buy yet for the PC
market, and a relatively low price for a new revolutionary
technology assembled together in a tiny little box, I couldn’t any
longer resist buying a Mac mini.

Calculating together all the pieces, shows that the price is fair
enough to buy, and as usual for Apple you can count on reliable
prices for a long time period. So, if you buy later, it will cost
almost the same and you will miss the technology advantage.

Compared to other processors, the Intel Core definitely has it’s
place, especially compared to power consumption (31Watts).

So here’re some pictures of my new baby, the Mac mini Core
Duo:

A new mac fan.

Finally I decided to delete all the
Fedora trash from my epia.Since I found some good howto’s for debian I gave Debian
Sarge
a chance which installed fairly easy, and most important,
rather
minimalistic. But again it lacks the newest kernel features
that will support my newer DVB-T card Terratec Cinergy 1400,
as well as framebuffer-support for the Epia M10000.

Fortunately, after some frickling, I managed to backport the
DVB
stuff into the older “newest” debian development kernel,
and also the via-frambuffer driver.

A bigger problem was the DRM/DRI drivers which refused to
compile
for my debian kernel, with some strange missing symbol
errors…
Anyway Mythtv is now up and running, although without
hardware
mpeg accelleration.
Menuloading is a real pain in the ass, and also channel
switching,
but timeshifting and the EPG works great anyway…

On the internet I found an article on “KnoppMyth” which
promised
to work “out of the box(from CD)” on a Epia system…
waahhh….

After a short try, I realized that it works also without
accelleration
and further needs a huge desktop installation….
Not to mention the missing support for my DVB card, but OK.

I really wonder that after those many years of DVB
introduction
it’s still impossible to buy a settopbox which has all
features
built in.

For example Pinnacle’s Showcenter (a streaming-client) can be
combined
with a streaming server PC which has a PCTV card (analogue or
DVB)
so it is possible to programm it like a VCR. But the only way to
see
Live-TV is to programm a channel via Showcenter, wait for the
recording
to start and then pickup the file inside the videolist and play
it.

That’s simply bullshit….